Escolar Documentos
Profissional Documentos
Cultura Documentos
O VISÍVEL
PROGRAMANDO
ORGANIZAÇÃO
JANE DE ALMEIDA
PATRÍCIA MORAN
PRISCILA ARANTES
FAROCKI
HARUN
O VISÍVEL
PROGRAMANDO
ORGANIZAÇÃO
JANE DE ALMEIDA
PATRÍCIA MORAN
PRISCILA ARANTES
FAROCKI
COLEÇÃO CINUSP
PRÓ-REITORIA DE CULTURA E
EXTENSÃO UNIVERSITÁRIA
UNIVERSIDADE DE SÃO PAULO
2017
HARUN
O VISÍVEL
PROGRAMANDO
ORGANIZAÇÃO
JANE DE ALMEIDA
PATRÍCIA MORAN
PRISCILA ARANTES
FAROCKI
UNIVERSIDADE DE SÃO PAULO CINUSP
REITOR DIRETORA
Dean Director
Marco Antonio Zago Patricia Moran Fernandes
VICE-REITOR VICE-DIRETOR
Vice Dean Vice Director
Vahan Agopyan Cristian Borges
COLEÇÃO CINUSP
CINUSP COLLECTION – VOLUME 10
COORDENAÇÃO GERAL
Coordination
Patrícia Moran
ORGANIZAÇÃO
Organization
Jane de Almeida, Priscila Arantes,
Patrícia Moran
PRODUÇÃO EDITORIAL
Editorial Production
Carolina Ferreira, Thiago de André
DESIGN GRÁFICO
Graphic Design
Guilherme Falcão
Almeida Jane; Arantes, Priscila; Moran, Patrícia
TRADUÇÃO (Orgs.)
Harun Farocki: Programando o Visível
Translation São Paulo
Brian Mier, Helena Prates Pró-Reitoria de Cultura e Extensão
Universitária – USP
2017
344p; 21 x 15,9 cm
ISBN 978 85 62587 22 1
1.Cinema 2.Harun Farocki 3.Videoinstalação
I.Arantes, Priscila II.Moran, Patricia III.Almeida,
Jane IV. Nesteriuk, Sérgio V.Elsasser Thomas
VI. Suppia, Alfredo
CDD 791.43092
CDU 791
8 12
APRESENTAÇÃO PROGRAMANDO O VISÍVEL
Foreword Programming the Visible
PRISCILA ARANTES JANE DE ALMEIDA
+ PATRÍCIA MORAN
74
10 PROGRAMANDO O VISÍVEL:
APRESENTAÇÃO CONVERSAS ENTRE VILÉM
Acknowledgements FLUSSER E HARUN FAROCKI
JANE DE ALMEIDA Programming the Visible:
Conversations between
Vilém Flusser and Harun Farocki
PRISCILA ARANTES
+ SERGIO NESTERIUK
104
O NOVO CONSTRUTIVISMO:
HARUN FAROCKI E ERIKA
BALSOM CONVERSAM SOBRE
PARALLEL I–IV
The New Constructivism :
Harun Farocki and Erika Balsom
Discuss Parallel I–IV
146
SIMULAÇÃO E O TRABALHO
DA INVISIBILIDADE:
PARALLEL I-IV DE
HARUN FAROCKI
THOMAS ELSAESSER
178
FAROCKI: IMAGENS
E CONVENÇÕES NO JOGO
E NA ARTE
Farocki: Images and Conventions in
the Game and Art
PATRÍCIA MORAN
220
SOBRE UMA POSSÍVEL
FOTOGENIA NOS VIDEOGAMES:
A PROPÓSITO DE PARALLEL I-IV
(2012-2014), DE HARUN FAROCKI
On a Possible Photogenic in Video
games: The Proposal of Parallel I-IV
(2012-2014), by Harun Farocki
ALFREDO SUPPIA
294
INTERFACE
HARUN FAROCKI
336
COLABORADORES
Collaborators
342
FICHA TÉCNICA
8
APRESENTAÇÃO
O CINUSP por seu lado, objetiva com suas mostras manter viva a dimensão ensa-
ística do cinema, seu lugar de produtor de pensamento. Convidados pelo Paço e
por Jane de Almeida para curar e acolher uma mostra sobre Harun Farocki, realiza-
da concomitantemente à exposição, de bom grado integrou-se ao evento. O cine-
asta e artista alemão Farocki expressa nossos anseios de reflexão, unir esforços
institucionais engrandece ambas as partes.
O leitor poderá, ainda, ter acesso ao texto produzido por Farocki para Interface
(1995), trabalho que integrou a mostra no Paço das Artes, em conjunto com a
série Paralelo I-IV (2014), e Frases de impacto, imagens de impacto: Uma conversa
com Vilém Flusser.
The Paço das Artes has developed the strategy of promoting exhibitions by
fundamental artists on the national and international scenes over the course of the
past 46 years. It was within this context that the institution received the exhibition
of work by Harun Farocki, Programming the Visible, curated by Jane de Almeida.
CINUSP, the film programming entity within the University of São Paulo, has
helped keep the essayistic dimension of cinema alive as part of its role as a
producer of knowledge. CINUSP was invited by the Paço das Artes and by Jane
de Almeida to curate and host a film series devoted to Farocki that coincided with
the exhibition and that could be integrated with the event. The German filmmaker
and artist Farocki expresses our yearning for reflection, and joining institutional
forces enriched both sides.
To complement and widen the discussions raised by the exhibition and the
series, CINUSP and the Paço das Artes jointly organized this publication of
texts by important researchers on Harun Farocki’s work, thus enabling a dive
into the production of an artist who knew how to navigate between cinema and
contemporary visual art like no one else could.
The reader can further see the text produced by Farocki for Interface (1995), a
work that formed part of the exhibition at the Paço das Artes together with the
installation series Parallel I-IV (2014) and the work Catch Phrases – Catch Images: A
Conversation with Vilém Flusser (1986).
9
10
AGRADECIMENTOS
Este livro é resultado da Exposição Harun Farocki: Programando o Visível que ocor-
reu no Paço das Artes, em São Paulo, no período de 28 de janeiro a 28 de março de
2016. Eu quero agradecer vários colegas e amigos que me encorajaram a realizar
estes dois trabalhos: a exposição e o livro. A ideia de uma exposição com trabalhos
de Farocki teve início em 2009, durante as discussões do grupo de pesquisa Cine-
ma e a Experiência do Conhecimento, na Pontifícia Universidade Católica de São
Paulo. Agradeço aos meus colegas Miguel Chaia, Maria Amélia da Silva e Mauro
Perón pelo apoio e oportunidade de apresentar as primeiras questões sobre a obra
de Farocki.
This book is the result of the exhibition Harun Farocki: Programming the Visible,
which took place at the Paço das Artes in São Paulo from January 28 to March 28,
2016. I would like to thank several colleagues and friends who encouraged me to
take on these two projects: The exhibition and the book. The idea of an exhibition
of Farocki’s works was born in 2009, during conversations within the research
group Cinema and the Experience of Knowledge, at the Catholic Pontifical
University of São Paulo. I would like to thank my colleagues Miguel Chaia, Maria
Amélia da Silva, and Mauro Perón for their support and for the opportunity to raise
the first questions about Farocki’s work.
I would like to thank Sabine Himmelsback and David Rodowick for their help
with contacting important participants in the exhibition and the book. I would
like to thank the authors Priscila Arantes, Sérgio Nesteriuk, Erika Balsom, Alfredo
Suppia, Thomas Elsaesser, and Patrícia Moran for their trust in participating in
this collection, and Matthias Rajmann for his patience dedicated to the initial
project, as well as for the opportunity and freedom that he conceded us in creating
the exhibition.
I would like to give special thanks to Antje Ehmann for the generosity and trust
with which she unhesitatingly welcomed this project, as well as for her motivating
words during its course.
11
12
PROGRAMANDO
O VISÍVEL
JANE DE
ALMEIDA
13
14
15
16
3 T. Elsaesser, Political Filmmaking after Brecht: Farocki, for Example, em T. Elsaesser (ed.), Harun Farocki: Working
on the Sightlines.
17
18
6 O conceito se torna conhecido na teoria do cinema devido ao artigo de J.-L. Baudry, Le Dispositif: approches
métapsychologiques de l’impression de realité, Communications, n. 23.
KLUGE EM FAROCKI
Na perspectiva do Novo Cinema Alemão, o premiado cineasta e inte-
lectual Alexander Kluge é um legatário da teoria brechtiana que propõe
um tipo de montagem com a conexão de imagens contraditórias, ou
mesmo imagens sem conexão imediata com o objetivo de proporcionar
ao espectador uma associação particular. Propõe assim a condução da
narrativa para um tipo de relação ativa da mente do espectador diante
das imagens, evitando ao máximo o processo manipulador12. Kluge é um
19
20
13 S. Liebman, “Why Kluge?”, On New German Cinema, Art, Enlightenment, and the Public Sphere: An Interview
with Alexander Kluge, October, n. 46.
14 M. Hansen, Reinventando os nickelodeons: Considerações sobre Kluge e o primeiro cinema; R. Stollmann, A
realidade não é realista: Alexander Kluge, o cinema alemão e europeu, em J. de Almeida (org), Alexander Kluge: o
quinto ato.
15 Ver C. Pavsek, Harun Farocki’s Images of the World, em que o autor assume que Kluge é uma influência maior na
obra de Farocki, mas que também há a de Huillet.
16 Ver comentário de N. Alter, The Political Im/perceptible: Images of The World... em T. Elsaesser (ed.), op. cit.,
p. 229. Ver também J. Becker, Images and Thoughts, People and Things, Materials and Methods em T. Elsaesser
(ed.), op. cit., p. 58, que afirma: “Neles, excursões e investigações históricas em, e o exame de, um tema visual dado
estão misturados com filmagens atuais para criar uma teia sincrônica e diacrônica, uma estrutura fílmica que está
relacionada initimamente em suas numerosas aberturas, suas linhas principais e paralelas, com o trabalho de
Alexander Kluge”.
21
22
preender o que ele diz, há ainda muito trabalho para o espectador’”17. Mas
também acusa: “Kluge é megalomaníaco demais para tornar a cooperação
possível”18. Como ambos são alemães e produziram obras políticas, pode
parecer que estas sejam as relações mais importantes entre os artistas. No
entanto, há uma profunda relação também, e talvez mais afinada, entre os
procedimentos fílmicos dos dois cineastas: uso de imagens de diferentes
procedências, a voz condutora do filme-ensaio (mesmo que Farocki tenha
escolhido outras vozes, além da sua), despreocupação com o tempo fílmi-
co e grande preocupação com o intervalo entre as imagens na montagem.
Farocki inicia sua carreira com apoio da televisão, com produtos em
formato 16mm para serem transmitidos pela televisão19, pois nos anos
1960 e 70, a televisão é que vai acolher a vanguarda fílmica na Alemanha
Ocidental20. Segundo o site com banco de dados que abriga a sua obra, só
em 1970, depois de realizar onze filmes, é que seu A divisão de todos os dias
vai participar de um festival de cinema, em Oberhausen21. Seus primeiros
filmes, considerados já ensaísticos, contam com sua participação como
ator e com performances filmadas. Estes ensaios tratam de questões
efervescentes do momento como greves, guerras e debates, o que pode
ser associado a uma natureza televisiva de produção. A televisão naquele
momento era um evento bastante novo e só em 1963 a Zweites Deutsches
Fernsehen – ZDF (Second German Television) vai dar início à transmissão
17 T. Elsaesser, Making the World Superfluous: An Interview with Harun Farocki, em T. Elsaesser (ed.), op. cit., p. 188.
18 R. Hüser, Nine Minutes in the Yard: A Conversation with Harun Farocki, em T. Elsaesser (ed.), op. cit., p. 311.
19 WDR (Westdeutscher Rundfunk) ver: 1. Original title Jeder ein Berliner Kindl, Director Harun Farocki
Cinematographer Gerd Delp Production DFFB, Berlin-West Format 16mm, b/w, 1:1,37 Length 4 min. 2. Original
title Zwei Wege Director, Scriptwriter Harun Farocki Cinematographer Horst Kandeler Production SFB, Berlin-West
TV-producer Hanspeter Krüger Format 16mm, b/w, 1:1,37 Length 3 min. First broadcast 31.03.1966, Nord 3 Note
commissioned for the TV series Berliner Fenster 3. Original title Die Worte des Vorsitzenden Director Harun Farocki
Assistant director Helke Sander Scriptwriter Harun Farocki, based on texts by Lin Piao Cinematographer Holger
Meins Production DFFB, Berlin-West Format 16mm, b/w,1:1,37 Length 3 min. First broadcast 27.06.1969, ZDF 4.
Original title Die Worte des Vorsitzenden Director Harun Farocki Assistant director Helke Sander Scriptwriter Harun
Farocki, based on texts by Lin Piao Cinematographer Holger Meins Production DFFB, Berlin-West Format 16mm,
b/w,1:1,37 Length 3 min. First broadcast 27.06.1969, ZDF.
20 N. Alter, Two or Three Things I Know about Harun Farocki, October, n. 151, p. 24.
21 Ver <http://www.harunfarocki.de/home.html>.
FILMES DE ARQUIVO
No curta Natal branco (1968) Farocki usa imagens de diferentes fontes
materiais22, podendo ser considerado um “proto” filme de arquivo de sua
extensa obra. Com cerca de 3 minutos, o filme é uma colagem de fotos e
imagens de diferentes fontes sincronizadas com trilha de Bing Crosby para
fazer crítica da imagem inocente do natal branco enquanto as pessoas mor-
rem na guerra do Vietnam. Um ano depois, Farocki realiza um filme sobre o
mesmo tema – talvez o mais comentado de todos – chamado O fogo inextin-
guível (1969), fazendo uso de performance, mas não de material de arquivo.
22 Ver H. Steyerl, Beginnings: Harun Farocki, 1944–2014, E-Flux, n. 59, onde se lê: “Os lendários trabalhos de Harun
Farocki – como diretor, escritor e organizador – são repletos de começos exemplares. De curtas agitprop para
filme-ensaios e além. De ficção didática para o cinema vérité. Do single channel a múltiplas telas. Do Kodak ao .avi, de
Mao para o mashup. Do cinema silencioso a conversas acaloradas. Do close reading ao comentário distanciado. Da
entrevista à intervenção, da colaboração à corroboração. Em 30 de julho, Harun Farocki faleceu.”
23
24
23 Segundo V. Siebel, Painting Pavements, em T. Elsaesser (ed.), op. cit., p. 45: “O objetivo era expor suas
maquinações. O WDR (Transmissões da Alemanha Ocidental) ofereceu-lhe uma plataforma para isso. Em 1973, para
as séries Telekritik (tele-crítica), Farocki realizou O problema com imagens, um metafilme crítico no qual ele marcou
pontos tendo o noticiário televisivo como formato, destacando o uso excessivo de imagens insignificantes.”
24 < http://www.harunfarocki.de/films/1970s/1973/the-trouble-with-images-a-critique-of-television.html>
25 Ou Filmes de Observação. C. Pavsek, op. cit., afirma que Tilman Baumgärtel chama a fase fílmica de Farocki de
“filmes de observação”.
26 A teoria tem debatido sobre a precisão e a nomenclatura de procedimentos fílmicos que surgem com o uso de
material reciclado do cinema e da televisão. Compilation Film refere-se a uma tradição primeiramente teorizada por J.
Leyda, Film Beget Films. Mais tarde surgem os Found Footage e mais recentemente os film-essay ou essay films.
25
26
30 L. Chinen, At Our Expense: Harun Farocki’s Images at War. Rhizome. “Inicialmente, eu não estava ciente de que
o exercício na parte dois era encenado; um deslize similar entre realidade e simulação ocorreu na terceira parte,
Imersão. Em uma sessão de terapia, um soldado reconta uma experiência traumática de combate ao mesmo tempo
usando um headset que transmite um ambiente simulado que reproduz a memória. O soldado parece cada vez
mais vulnerável à medida que a sessão prossegue, revelando sentimentos desconexos em relação aos seus colegas
soldados e a visão do corpo mutilado de seu parceiro. Quando a sessão termina, entretanto, o soldado sorri, uma
plateia aplaude e vemos que esse grande cenário era a demonstração do software usado para recriar ambientes de
guerra para tratar o transtorno de estresse pós-traumático.”
27
28
31 Ibidem.
32 Ver J. Leyda, op. cit. Pode-se considerar que mesmo os filmes dos irmãos Lumière são de arquivo, já que muitas
cenas não foram filmadas por eles próprios, mas com câmeras enviadas para “trazer o mundo ao mundo”.
33 T. Elsaesser, Political Filmmaking after Brecht: Farocki, for Example, op. cit.
29
30
34 Seria um erro dizer que não houve preocupação política nas arte plásticas no século XX, mas grandes discussões
da arte envolvendo Clement Greenberg, Arthur Danto, Aby Warburg tocam em política de forma tangencial. Giulio
Carlo Argan, no entanto, foi um exemplo de historiador e ativista político. Os artistas-celebridades, comentados
intelectualmente como Duchamp, Picasso ou Warhol não são reconhecidos pela suas performances políticas. No
cinema, a divisão pode ser considerada outra: entre o cinema hollywoodiano e o europeu. No universo europeu,
uma parte significativa dos grandes nomes fez filmes com preocupações e plataformas políticas: Eisenstein, Vertov,
Godard, Resnais, Marker, Fassbinder, Pasolini, Visconti, Oshima, Marker – para falar alguns clássicos.
31
32
36 Ver R. Storr, Kassel Rock: Interview with Curator Catherine David, Artforum, v. 35, n. 9, p. 77.
37 R. Krauss, The Power Of The Specific Image. “The media, translated as video installations, which create vivid
spectacles that engulf and overwhelm their viewers are now, indeed, the contemporary work elicited by the
international exhibition or art fair.”
38 Ibidem.
39 Y.-A. Bois, In Conversation: Rosalind Krauss with Yve-Alain Bois, The Brooklyn Rail, Feb 1st, 2012.
33
34
nhecido por esta tática por causa de seu movimento singular no xadrez.
O garfo de um rei ou rainha é algumas vezes chamado de “garfo real”. No
caso de Schklóvski, o movimento do cavalo evocado parece ter relação
com seu artigo anterior “A arte como procedimento” de 1925 através do
qual apresenta a necessidade da técnica da desfamiliarização na arte para
liberar as imagens solidificadas e não percebidas pelo seu uso contínuo e
sem reflexão. Mas também o Movimento do cavalo é um metáfora do ca-
minho tortuoso que Schklóvski afirma preferir ao movimento “obediente
do peão e do rei”.
Entre dois universos teóricos e críticos, Farocki empresta à Documen-
ta a discussão política necessária para o momento, mas persiste no jogo
modernista cuja ética exige a “invenção de um meio”, como diria Stanley
Cavell42. O livro Art Since 1900, um compêndio sobre a história da arte
dos séculos XX e XXI, editado por Krauss e outros historiadores ligados à
October, incluiu na sua terceira edição de 2016 uma entrada sobre Harun
Farocki entre os proporcionalmente poucos exemplos de arte depois do
ano 200043, argumentando que o artista apresenta “uma série de traba-
lhos sobre a guerra e a visão [...] demonstrando a relação entre as formas
populares de entretenimento das novas mídias, como os videogames e as
condutas da guerra.”44 Duplo ataque no cânone da arte – o movimento do
cavalo é o movimento dos bravos, diz Schklóvski. É fato que Harun Faroc-
ki nunca deixou de fazer filmes, mas é um dos cineastas mais conhecidos
como artista da arte contemporânea.
42 S. Cavell, The World Viewed, p. 104. “Eu caracterizei a tarefa do artista moderno como não sendo a de criar uma
nova instância de sua arte, mas um novo meio dentro dela.”
43 O compêndio apresenta apenas vinte artistas de 2000 a 2016.
44 H. foster et. al., Art Since 1900, v. 2.
35
36
45 G. Rocha, Revolução do cinema novo, p. 201-202. “Falei […] com Godard, que me disse: ‘Vocês, brasileiros, devem
destruir o cinema’. Eu não concordo. Vocês, na França, na Itália, podem destruí-lo. Mas nós ainda o estamos
construindo em todos os níveis, na linguagem, na estética, na técnica...”; p. 151-152: “Nos dias passados falei com
Godard sobre a colocação do cinema político. Godard sustenta que nós no Brasil estamos na situação ideal para
fazer um cinema revolucionário, e ao invés disso, fazemos ainda um cinema revisionista, isto é, dando importância
ao drama, ao desenvolvimento do espetáculo, em suma. Na sua concepção, existe hoje um cinema para quatro
mil pessoas, de militante a militante. Eu entendo Godard. Um cineasta europeu, francês, é lógico que se ponha o
problema de destruir o cinema. Mas nós não podemos destruir aquilo que não existe. E colocar nestes termos o
problema é sectário e, portanto, errado. Nós estamos em uma fase de liberação nacional que passa também pelo
cinema, e o relacionamento com o público popular é fundamental. Nós não temos o que destruir, mas construir.
Cinemas, Casas, Estradas, Escolas etc.”
37
38
46 Nora Alter relata que Farocki adorava futebol e que era a única arena na qual ele expressava orgulho nacional. Ela
também descreve que ele teria assistido aos jogos da copa que ocorreu no Brasil. Seria interessante saber qual foi a
reação dele diante do vergonhoso 7 a 1, placar do jogo que a Alemanha venceu o Brasil. Como teria compreendido as
imagens de uma profunda ferida do orgulho nacional brasileiro?
47 Ver R. Bellour, La querelle des Dispositifs.
48 Ver “The New Constructivism: Harun Farocki and Erika Balsom Discuss Parallel I–IV”, infra.
49 Ibidem.
39
40
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BORGES, Cristian; MOURÃO, Patrícia; MOURÃO, LEYDA, Jay. Film Beget Films: A Study of the Compilation
Maria Dora (orgs.). Harun Farocki: Por uma politização Film. New York : Hill and Wang, 1971.
do olhar. São Paulo: Cinemateca Brasileira, 2010. Dispo- MENDE, Doreen. The Many Haruns: A Timeline Th-
nível em: < http://cinemateca.gov.br/farocki/catalogo. rough Books and Hand Gestures from 18,000 BC–2061.
php>. Acesso em: 21 nov. 2016. E-Flux, n. 59, Nov., 2014 Disponível em: <http://
BRECHT, Bertolt. Um Homem é um Homem. Teatro www.e-flux.com/journal/59/61102/the-many-haruns-a-
Completo 2. Trad. de Fernando Peixoto. São Paulo: Paz -timeline-through-books-and-hand-gestures-from-18-
e Terra, 1991. -000-bc-2061/>. Acesso em: 11 mar. 2016.
CAVELL, Stanley. The World Viewed. Cambridge: Har- OSHIMA, Nagisa. Cinema, Censorship, and the State: The
vard University press, 1995. Writings of Nagisa Oshima. Editado por Annette Michel-
CHINEN, Lucy. At Our Expense: Harun Farocki’s Ima- son. Cambridge and London: The MIT Press, 1992.
ges at War. Rhizome. Disponível em: < https://rhizome. PAVSEK, Christopher. Harun Farocki’s Images of the
org/editorial/2014/jul/25/harun-farocki/>. World. Disponível em: <http://www.rouge.com.au/12/
DANTO, Arthur C. O Mundo da Arte. Artefilosofia, Ouro farocki.html>.
Preto, n. 1, jul. 2006. RODOWICK, David N. A consciência liberada de Harun
ELSAESSER, Thomas. The Future of “Art” and “Work” Farocki. In: SOBRINHO, Gilberto Alexandre (org.). Ci-
in the Age of Vision Machines: Harun Farocki. In: nemas em redes: tecnologia, estética e política na era digital.
HALLE, Randall; STEINGRÖVER, Reinhill (eds.). After Campinas: Papirus, 2016.
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42
ENTREVISTAS E VÍDEOS
Erika Balsom – Serious Games.
Harun Farocki On Materiality – Cine-fils. Disponível
em: <http://marocservers.com/mp3/video/YuVLO-
zW3J-k/Harun_Farocki_On_Materiality_-_Cine-fils.
html>. Acesso em: 11 mar 2016.
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44
PROGRAMMING
THE VISIBLE
JANE DE
ALMEIDA
1 S. Freud; A. Zweig, The Letters of Sigmund Freud and Arnold Zweig, p. 119.
2 Ibidem.
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46
placement in relation to the fact that he had not imagined that he would
make it “that far”. This feeling, according to him, came from his poverty
and from his life conditions.
There are various interpretations of this event, but here it evokes the
phenomenon that the narrative of reality impedes the subjective experi-
ence in place of motivating it. When transposing this effect to the cinema,
one can point to various instances of film theory that concern themselves
with the production of an alienating narrative effect that either surpasses
reality or is inferior to it. Evidently, a film does not correspond to the ex-
act size of reality even when it aspires to do so, for example, through simu-
lation. In this case, cinema could be compared to a professor who narrates
the history of Athens in an absolutely impactful way in order to repress
the real Athens from his students’ reach. In the case of Freud, it took until
he was forty-eight years old for him to be practically “pushed” to Athens
and to feel very bad during the day on which he should have made his trip,
hounded by a feeling that he would not be able to arrive at the city. The
psychic state of Freud accompanied his incredulity about the fact that he
could arrive in Athens and feel depressed. He speculated about what had
happened at the time: “We’re going to see Athens? Out of the question! –
It will be far too difficult!” Finally, Freud associated “out of the question”
with its inverse reference: “Too good to be true”.
This disturbance of memory at the Acropolis reveals how the mecha-
nism of denial of reality can passively induce a state of non-belonging – an
effect that can also be produced by cinema. This appears to be a concern
for various film theorists. Or, to the contrary, cinema could exercise the
role of liberator from this model of passivity, adjusting the critical point
of view of the receiver in relation to the sensation of non-belonging. The-
odor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Siegfried Kracauer, Jean-Louis Baudry,
Christian Metz, Laura Mulvey – these are just some examples and the list
could continue with other names, but the proposal here is only to refer to
the “universe” in question.
The dis-alienation suggested by Freud is not specifically associated
with the political universe, yet cinema and its accompanying theoreti-
cal side which seeks a libertarian method inspired by Bertolt Brecht and
Viktor Shklovsky are both concerned with the problem of alienation,
according to Marxist theory. The influence of both authors has been ac-
knowledged by various film directors and analyzed by numerous critics
and theorists.
Marx’s Entfrumdung (alienation) refers to the psychological disas-
sociation of the worker in relation to the production resulting from his
labor and the monetary value that he is given for his work according to
the logic of capitalism. “Defamiliarization”, “distancing”, and “breaking
the fourth wall” are some of the best-known methods from the Brechtian
playbook that have been elaborated by politically engaged filmmakers,
albeit with singular meanings on display in each of their works. Jean-Luc
Godard makes reference to Brecht beginning at least with Le Mépris (Con-
tempt, 1963) in which Brigitte Bardot’s BB moves into Bertold Brecht3.
The Brechtian influence becomes more evident once Godard unites with
Jean Pierre Gorin to form the Dziga Vertov Group. Beginning in 1968, both
filmmakers assume the position of a radical Brecht, with a line of investi-
gation that involves not only language, but the entire system or apparatus
of filmmaking.
3 T. Elsaesser, “Political Filmmaking after Brecht: Farocki, for Example”, in T. Elsaesser (ed.), Harun Farocki: Working
on the Sightlines.
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48
5 The concept became known in cinema theory due to the article by J.-L. Baudry, “Le Dispositif: approches
métapsychologiques de l’impression de realité”, Communications, n. 23.
6 Today, they can be decodified as terrorists. For example, when they offer a manual about how to make a domestic
bomb in Wind from the East (1968).
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50
The demolition of the fourth wall moves towards the direction of de-
nouncing the cinematic “apparatus”7, a “mechanism” that integrates all of
the particularities of a film beyond its message and aesthetic technique:
The dark room, the projector, the chair, the programming, the duration
of the film. This line of thinking fueled the criticisms of so-called “op-
erational images” produced by the photographic box, placing the very
machine8 and its “technical images”9 in question and drawing attention to
the production of medical and industrial images as well as images of train-
ing.
In a certain sense, it would be necessary to reinvent Brecht or even
search for a comprehension of “going beyond Brecht”, rethinking and
producing other effects proper to a more recent context with different
perspectives. Authors have ended up going back to Benjamin10 in order to
commence a rereading of Brecht, beginning with Benjamin’s text about
the gesture, which he wrote in relation to Chinese11 theater when he saw
the Peking Opera in Moscow, for example.
KLUGE IN FAROCKI
Within the perspective of the New German Cinema, the prize-
winning filmmaker and intellectual Alexander Kluge is a torchbearer of
Brechtian theory who proposes a kind of editing made through connect-
ing contradictory images, or even images with no immediate connections
between them, with the goal of providing particular associations for his
audiences. He thus proposes the guidance of narrative towards a place in
7 L. Althusser, Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses; e J.-L. Baudry, op. cit.
8 See V. Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography.
9 In commenting on Kittler’s and Flusser’s concepts, Elsaesser observes that the operational or technical images,
according to Flusser and Kittler, drew Farocki’s attention before they appeared in better-developed form in the work
of these theorists. See T. Elsaesser, “The Future of ‘Art’ and ‘Work’ in the Age of Vision Machines: Harun Farocki”, in
R. Halle; R. Steingröver (eds.), After the Avant-garde, p. 37.
10 W. Benjamin, “Que é o teatro épico? Um estudo sobre Brecht”, Magia e técnica, arte e política, p. 89. (PT)
11 B. Brecht, Man Equals Man.
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52
15 See C. Pavsek, “Harun Farocki’s Images of the World”, one of the few articles to present Kluge as an influence on
Farocki’s work.
16 Ibid.
voice in films, saying, “Kluge has such a wonderful feminine Saxon word-
melody!” He then continued, “When Kluge speaks it’s not at all easy to
understand what he says – there is still plenty of work for the spectator”17.
But Farocki also accused: “Kluge is just too much of a megalomaniac to
make co-operation possible”18. Since both artists were German and pro-
duced political works, it could appear that these are the most important
connections between them. Nevertheless, there is also a deep relation-
ship, that is perhaps more defined, between the filmmaking procedures
of the two directors: The usage of images from different sources, the con-
ductive narrating voice of the essay film (even though Farocki chose vari-
ous voices in addition to his own), the lack of concern with filmic time,
and the great concern with the intervals between images in montage.
Farocki began his career with the support of television by making works
in 16mm to be transmitted through the medium19, since during the 1960s
and 1970s, television was what welcomed the cinematic vanguard in West
Germany20. According to the filmmaker’s website, it was only in 1970 – af-
ter he had made 11 films – that Farocki’s film The Division of All Days (1970)
became his first work to participate in a film festival (in Oberhausen)21. His
early films, already considered to be essayistic, counted with his participa-
tion as an actor and with filmed performances. These film essays explored
17 T. Elsaesser, “Making the World Superfluous: An Interview with Harun Farocki”, in T. Elsaesser (ed.), op. cit., p.
188.
18 R. Hüser, “Nine Minutes in the Yard: A Conversation with Harun Farocki”, in T. Elsaesser (ed.), op. cit., p. 311.
19 WDR (Westdeutscher Rundfunk) see: 1. Original title Jeder ein Berliner Kindl, Director Harun Farocki
Cinematographer Gerd Delp Production DFFB, Berlin-West Format 16mm, b/w, 1:1,37 Length 4 min. 2. Original
title Zwei Wege Director, Scriptwriter Harun Farocki Cinematographer Horst Kandeler Production SFB, Berlin-West
TV-producer Hanspeter Krüger Format 16mm, b/w, 1:1,37 Length 3 min. First broadcast 31.03.1966, Nord 3 Note
commissioned for the TV series Berliner Fenster 3. Original title Die Worte des Vorsitzenden Director Harun Farocki
Assistant director Helke Sander Scriptwriter Harun Farocki, based on texts by Lin Piao Cinematographer Holger
Meins Production DFFB, Berlin-West Format 16mm, b/w,1:1,37 Length 3 min. First broadcast 27.06.1969, ZDF 4.
Original title Die Worte des Vorsitzenden Director Harun Farocki Assistant director Helke Sander Scriptwriter Harun
Farocki, based on texts by Lin Piao Cinematographer Holger Meins Production DFFB, Berlin-West Format 16mm,
b/w,1:1,37 Length 3 min. First broadcast 27.06.1969, ZDF.
20 N. Alter, “Two or Three Things I Know about Harun Farocki”, October, n. 151, p. 24.
21 See <http://www.harunfarocki.de/home.html>.
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54
effervescent issues of his time such as strikes, wars, and ongoing public de-
bates, and they can be associated with a style of production typical to tele-
vision. The medium at that time marked a very new event, and it was only
in 1963 that Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen – ZDF (Second German Televi-
sion) began centralized transmission of television with continual pro-
gramming. This context indicates, in Western German television’s birth, a
type of production work undertaken without the expectation of traditional
cinematographic recognition, characterized by the usage of filmic material
(16mm and 35mm), content directed towards reception within a cinema
theater, and duration that fell within festival range (short films, up to 15
minutes, and long films, over 60 minutes). From the beginning, Farocki’s
films did not make use of well-known actors, nor of pre-established dura-
tions, and despite being filmed in 16mm, they debuted on television. For
these reasons, Farocki began his career as a filmmaker who was considered
to be an extreme outsider, one who failed to meet the basic requirements
for a successful career at the time with an aim to screen work in reputed
European festivals. It is worth remembering that both Godard and Kluge
ended up dislocating themselves towards a type of impure cinema made up
of works financed by television, but that they did so after they had received
recognition from important European festivals that assured them space
for daring experiments and guaranteed reception.
FOUND-FOOTAGE FILMS
In the short film White Christmas (1968), Farocki uses images from dif-
ferent material sources22 to make what can be considered a “proto” found-
22 See H. Steyerl, “Beginnings: Harun Farocki, 1944–2014”, E-Flux, n. 59, which says: “Harun Farocki’s legendary
works – as filmmaker, writer, and organizer – are full of exemplary beginnings. From agitprop shorts to film essays
and beyond. From didactic fiction to cinema verité. From single channel to multi-screen. From Kodak to .avi, from
Mao to mashup. From silent films to hyperventilating talkies. From close reading to distanced comment. From
interview to intervention, from collaboration to corroboration. On July 30, Harun Farocki died.”
footage film within his extensive body of work. This film of around three
minutes in length is a collage of photos and images from different sources,
all synchronized to a soundtrack of music by Bing Crosby, that criticizes
the innocent image of a white Christmas offered while people die in the
Vietnam War. One year later, Farocki made a film on the same subject –
perhaps the most commented-upon of all his works – called The Inextin-
guishable Fire (1969), which makes use of performance, but not of archival
material. Farocki returns to the essay procedure marked by multiple im-
ages from different origins in The Trouble with Images (1973)23, which was
compiled from television scenes. This was his first film made entirely with
archival footage. During the previous year he had made The Language of
Revolution (1972) with a great part of the material filmed by third parties,
but still with some excerpts filmed by him. About The Trouble with Images,
Farocki offered the following: “I want to demonstrate that most feature
films are of the sort that make people lose their interest and appetite for
the real world.”24 This is a nodal point of production in his most distinct
styles of filmmaking (activist, observational, or essayistic), adding to the
fact that the phrase rightly corresponds well with the inhibition about
which Freud wrote.
23 See V. Siebel, “Painting Pavements”, in T. Elsaesser (ed.), op. cit., p. 45: “The aim was to expose their
machinations. The WDR (West German Broadcasting) offered him a platform for this. In 1973, for the series
Telekritik (tele-criticism), Farocki made Der Ärger mit den Bildern (The Trouble with Images), a critical meta-film
in which he settled scores with the television news feature as a format, by pointing out the systematic over use of
meaningless images.”
24 < http://www.harunfarocki.de/films/1970s/1973/the-trouble-with-images-a-critique-of-television.html>.
55
56
essay films or compilation films25. His most recent films are denominated
as “observational films” and, according to Pavsek, had their start with the
film An Image (1983): A documentary with long takes in which the camera
puts itself in the position of voyeur during a session of photos taken of a
nude woman for Playboy Magazine. The film is 25 minutes long and was
made for television for the series Projektionen´83.
The fact that the camera takes its time in residing on the image – thus
leaving the spectator in the place of an attentive participant – and the fact
that these films steer towards denaturalizing images26 are important ele-
ments, since a singular and strategically used discomfort is provoked by
the positioning of the parts involved in observational films: The position
of television that “commissioned” the film, aiming for criticism of the
advertising image of consumption, and the position of photographers that
believe they are being filmed in order to be publicized. Farocki, however,
does not opt for any of the sides and affirms that he wants to go beyond
these places27. The duplicity of positioning is better understood if the
spectator knows of Farocki’s standpoint as a militant author and contem-
plator of images. Furthermore, Farocki does not ever position himself
out of the scene. The spectator is imprisoned in the ghostly trap between
two places, with the hope that the filmmaker chooses one of them – the
place of enjoying the image of a naked woman, and that of the critic of the
system of image exploitation. Between the uninformed spectators (the
Testadura, as philosopher Arthur Danto said in respect to the naive spec-
25 The theory contains debates about the precision and the nomenclature of filming procedures that arose with the
usage of recycled material in film and television. Compilation Film refers to a tradition first theorized by J. Leyda, Film
Beget Films. Later the term Found Footage arose, and more recently, Film-Essay or Essay Films.
26 Effects marked by C. Pavsek, op. cit.
27 “This film, An Image, is part of a series I’ve been working on since 1979. The television station that commissioned
it assumes in these cases that I’m making a film that is critical of its subject matter, and the owner or manager of
the thing that’s being filmed assumes that my film is an advertisement for them. I try to do neither. Nor do I want
to do something in between, but beyond both.” Synopsis written by Farocki, see <http://www.harunfarocki.de/
films/1980s/1983/an-image.html>.
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58
a new “starting point for a new vision of the human being”. Documentary
sketches of advertising photographs with an observational character join
with images of Flemish paintings, with voiceover narration making asso-
ciations between them or else producing associative contrasts.
Farocki’s observational films are composed with few camera move-
ments and few positioning angles – they are almost security videos. In the
case of Still Life, there are many extended close shots, and at first, their
usage appears to be a particular strategy to concede time so that the spec-
tator may retain his view of the image. The next step is to find a reason for
this choice of the filmmaker, since for some time the spectator stays in
front of long shots without the expected connections to other shots, no
cuts, no fusion, almost no “montage”. It is left to the spectator to ques-
tion the author’s intentions and make associations, generally starting
from historical references – whether from the theme, or from language, or
from the medium in its specificity. This procedure suggests a significant
dislocation in Farocki’s career, which, little by little, removes itself from
cinema to enter the world of art in its contemporary perspective.
A more recent example of this procedure is the series of video instal-
lations, Serious Games, begun in 2009. The first work of the series, called
Immersion, is composed of a two-screen installation filmed in an American
military training center in California. The left-hand screen shows a com-
puter training game and the right-hand screen shows a person wearing a
virtual reality mask. There is nothing new in the language of either film, if
not the division of the image that raises intellectual questions and associa-
tions related to the very division of the subject from what the image repre-
sents. However, when the soldier suddenly makes manifest his traumatic
collapse, the left screen turns disturbingly black29. What is being shown is a
29 L. Chinen, “At Our Expense: Harun Farocki’s Images at War”. Rhizome: “Initially, I wasn’t aware that the exercise
therapeutic game for war veterans who have Post-Traumatic Stress Disor-
der (PTSD). For nearly the entirety of the 20-minute-long film, the soldier
retraces his traumatic warpath, now within a simulated space in the video
game and accompanied by a psychologist in a supposedly therapeutic ac-
tivity. The game situation employed to cure war trauma is itself anecdotal
if we take into account the theoretical relevance of the theme in the fields
principally of psychoanalysis, psychology, and literature. Trauma is a theo-
retical concept that Freud and Lacan recreated in psychiatry to name a
complex and important approach in psychoanalysis and in studies about
the psyche in general. More recently, literary studies adopted the concept
of trauma to speak about the Holocaust. This is to say that the theory of
trauma carries an intellectual weight in the humanities, which immedi-
ately contrasts with the usage of games for therapeutic ends. This issue
presents itself as a subtext to the curiosity in understanding how the visual
field and the psyche can be affected by computerized image technologies.
Once again, the specter of the double appears, willed into place precisely
by the absence of a cinema of associative montage and by the presence of
a “direct” cinema, but a contemporary kind of direct cinema that awaits
the judgment of the spectator who no longer believes in the raw truth of
the camera. The narrative proceeds and the soldier “relives” the trauma
in a blunt manner – making ever-larger the ghost that inhabits the space
between the image that wants to show itself (Farocki alleges that it was
very easy to obtain permission to film inside the military training center30,
and it is imaginable that the center wanted to be publicized) and that which
in part two was staged; a similar slippage between reality and simulation occurred in the third part, Immersion. In
a therapy session, a soldier retells a traumatic combat experience while wearing a headset streaming a simulated
environment which replicates the memory. The soldier seems more and more vulnerable as the session proceeds,
revealing feelings of disconnect toward his fellow soldiers and the sight of the mutilated body of his partner.
When the session ends, though, the soldier smiles, an audience claps, and we see that this whole scenario was a
demonstration of the software used to recreate war environments to treat post-traumatic stress disorder.”
30 Ibidem.
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investigates (on the part of the filmmaker) without being able to fall easy
prey to the Baudrillardian trick of the simulacrum as an image of the copy
of reality. Conducting the film along this line of tension towards the point
in which the soldier reveals himself as a software salesman is an act of great
expertise on Farocki’s part – a rhetorical doubling strategy that dislocates
itself from the method of meta-language used in earlier years. Such a dislo-
cation also enables consideration of Farocki’s concern with psychic alien-
ation, perhaps as a predecessor of political alienation.
PASSAGE TO SPACE
This creative trajectory, which occurred between 1983 and 2009, is
known as the journey of the filmmaker towards the condition of artist,
which met with great critical acclaim. Farocki’s first art installation, In-
terface, was commissioned by the Lille Modern Art Museum in France in
1995. The commission envisioned a piece by the artist about his work, and
Farocki inaugurated this stage with a question about what it meant to use
works from other people. The Soviet filmmaker Esfir Shub made films
with material from other films beginning in 1927 and is the introductory
example of a type of film, if not genre, constituted from archival material31.
Starting from this point, there have been innumerable other films made
with various materials. In the context of the Second World War, the infa-
mous film The Eternal Jew (1940) was composed primarily from third-par-
ty images in order to manipulate the German public and justify the crimes
committed by the Nazi regime. Later, Alain Resnais’s renowned film Night
and Fog (1956) made use of archival footage to raise the spectator’s aware-
ness of his commitment to a politics of images, a usage that Farocki has
31 See J. Leyda, op. cit. Once can consider that even the films of the Lumière brothers are made of archival material,
since many scenes were not filmed by them, but with cameras sent out to “bring the world to the world”.
said inspired him32. Both cases bring to bear the complex ethical issue of
the Holocaust, with the first case used for making Nazi propaganda and
the second with the goal of considering the absurdity of the event’s atroci-
ties. Images of the Holocaust represent a crucial point in the discussion
of the truth of the image in the 20th century, and this discussion can be fol-
lowed through the debate proposed by Claude Lanzmann in Shoah (1985).
A curious example is the fact that the first fiction film to use scenes of
material registered in the concentration camps was The Stranger (1946),
directed by Orson Welles. The film is about the postwar hunt to capture a
fugitive Nazi. In order to convince the character of the Nazi’s wife about
the true identity of her husband, the investigators uses real scenes from
the Holocaust to guarantee the truthfulness of their position. However,
in Interface, the problem that Farocki approaches – despite touching on
the margin of the question of the truth of the image – directs itself to an
appropriation of images that were initially made for one context and that
then gained another through subsequent reassembly.
With Interface, Farocki also inaugurated a mode of presenting a film by
means of two screens to enter into dialogue with the viewer in an art gal-
lery, operating in a very different circuit from that of the film club. In addi-
tion to the basic social differences generated by mere facts – a work of art
is expensive and generally made with cheap materials (with exceptions,
of course), while a film needs a great deal of money to be made but very
little to be watched – the two intellectual worlds each produced theories
that are inherent to their fields33. Sometimes theory and production meet,
32 T. Elsaesser, “Political Filmmaking after Brecht: Farocki, for Example”, op. cit.
33 It would be an error to say that there is no political concern in 20th-century fine arts, but great conversations
involving Clement Greenberg, Arthur Danto, and Aby Warburg touched on politics in a tangential manner. Giulio
Carlo Argan was an example of a historian and political activist. The celebrity-artists who have been discussed in
intellectual circles, such as Duchamp, Picasso, and Warhol, are not recognized for their political performances.
In cinema, the division can be considered another: Between Hollywood cinema and European. In the European
universe, a significant portion of great names made films with political concerns or platforms: Eisenstein, Vertov,
Godard, Resnais, Marker, Fassbinder, Pasolini, Visconti, Oshima, and Marker – to name a few of the classics.
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62
but not always. One example is precisely the concern with the alienation
of the spectator, which was emblematic of postwar political cinema and
fueled by a robust and lasting debate, and which did not provoke a discus-
sion of art at the same level. It is not that the debate was seen as being over
form and realism in the arts, over general and specific objects, or even
over the end of art history. Politics fomented various movements, but did
not present itself as the primary subject. Today, one of the demands of
“political discourse” in contemporary art is to diminish the space between
art and life, due to the fact that art in recent times has produced a herme-
neutic intellectual discourse deemed inaccessible to novitiates and to
social classes that have not been introduced to it.
When Farocki presented Interface in a museum, he also made a linguis-
tic passage towards an eye divided between two screens for the viewer
accustomed to seeing paintings on walls. The German curator and theo-
retician Doreen Mende called this moment of his work a “spatial turn”34.
Together with the divided space, the “film” was exhibited in continual
looping, without the old need of the apparatuses of cinema and television
to program the time of the exhibitions. The audience of art installations
would therefore encounter the “film” in any part of its narrative and the
artist would understand that it would be necessary to conceive of an ad-
equate language for this phenomenon.
Thematically, Interface prompts one to think of Farocki’s artistic prac-
tice that recuperated his films in order to produce a meta-language that
reflected on his work, triggering a self-referential process that coincided
with the trajectory of a career as it withdrew from cinema and approxi-
mated museum and gallery art. In 1997, the film Still Life had its debut in
documenta in Kassel, but within a series of films connected to the exhibi-
35 See R. Storr, “Kassel Rock: Interview with Curator Catherine David”, Artforum, v. 35, n. 9, p. 77.
63
64
36 R. Krauss, “The Power Of The Specific Image”. “The media, translated as video installations, which create
vivid spectacles that engulf and overwhelm their viewers are now, indeed, the contemporary work elicited by the
international exhibition or art fair.”
37 Ibidem.
38 Y.-A. Bois, “In Conversation: Rosalind Krauss with Yve-Alain Bois”, The Brooklyn Rail, Feb 1st, 2012.
the work of the same name by Viktor Shklovsky, published in 1923. Shk-
lovsky’s Knight’s Move contains a collection of short articles written in
previous years for a theater journal, and he begins by affirming that there
are many reasons for a “strangeness of the movement of the knight”,
with “the first being the conventionality of art.” He affirms that the sec-
ond reason resides in the fact that the knight is not free, “he moves in the
form of an L because it is prohibited for him to take the road in a straight
line”. Before going further, it is necessary to remember that “strange-
ness” refers to the famous concept of Ostrannenie, which is called “defa-
miliarization” in English.
To explain his hypothesis, Krauss describes Farocki’s operation, which
presents the transposition to the digital universe of filmed celluloid im-
ages that can be touched with the hands, showing that the filmic material
disappears without leaving a trace. This transposition is associated with
the process of Enigma, a Nazi encryption machine whose first versions
had a model with a typewriter incorporated in the device. Most of the
Enigma models used three or four rotors with a reflector to allow for the
same configurations to be used to code and decode messages. Interface,
which in German is Schnittstelle, also means “editing table”. In the words
of Farocki, “Might this editing station be an encoder or a decoder?”39 Is it
to decode a secret or to maintain one? Farocki, with his dual-image projec-
tion (in the case of the version mentioned by Krauss, two televisions on
top of a pedestal), presents on one screen the raw material to be edited,
and on the other, the edited footage.
Krauss then creates the following argument: “The double doubled as
Farocki’s celebration of specificity is enrolled as medium – the double of
the knight’s fork – holding the installation’s king in check. As knight of
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the editing room, he says ‘check’ to installation art’s demand for an end
to the medium, as for the white cube. His works may be called installa-
tions, but this circumvents the question.”40
On the chessboard, the fork represents a double attack move through
a bifurcation by which the knight is strategically placed in position to
attack two important pieces of the opponent at the same time. The op-
ponent will lose one of them, since it is impossible to defend both simul-
taneously. When the tactic is very efficient, the knight can put the king
in check. Other pieces can also make the double attack, but the knight is
known best for this tactic because of its unique movement on the chess-
board. The fork of a king or a queen is sometimes called the royal fork. In
the case of Shklovsky, the evoked knight’s movement seems to relate to
his 1925 article “Art as Technique” or “Art as Device”, in which he presents
the need for the technique of defamiliarization in art to liberate the im-
ages that are solidified and not perceived by their continual usage without
reflection. However, the knight’s movement is also a metaphor for the tor-
tuous path that Shklovsky prefers to the “obedient movement of the pawn
and the king”.
Between two theoretical and critical universes, Farocki lent the politi-
cal discussion necessary for the moment to documenta, but persisted in
the modernist game whose ethics demand the “invention of a medium”,
as Stanley Cavell wrote41. The book Art Since 1900 (2004), a summary of
the history of art in the 20th and 21st centuries that was edited by Krauss
and by other historians connected to October, included an entry on Harun
Farocki in its third edition of 2016 among the proportionately few ex-
amples of art after 200042, arguing that “Harun Farocki exhibits a range of
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fact that the images in the local media did not prohibit people from going
into the streets in protests in favor or against the government, although the
pro-government intellectuals affirmed that, in reality, the media was manip-
ulating the naïve. There is really a very tenuous line between images that ma-
nipulate and those that inhibit. Above all, these people, who are young and
knowledgeable about games, did not experience the 20th-century debates
about the status of the image in politics or the political image.
In the case of the Brazilian debate over the image, I always keep in
mind Glauber Rocha’s proposal made in reaction to a supposed provo-
cation of Godard about the so-called “Third World Cinema”, which
the Frenchman believed should be destroyed (I think in revolutionary
fashion)44. Glauber, on the other hand, argued that Brazilian cinema had
barely even been built, “on all levels, in language, in aesthetics, in tech-
nique”. This probable gap between the European debate about politi-
cal cinema and the Brazilian debate implicates what kind of reading of
Farocki’s work? It is difficult to measure, but there is a significant academ-
ic interest for his cinema in cinematheques and in film clubs that is always
associated with the political realm.
Farocki’s work was likely initially shown in Brazil around 2008 or
2009, with one or two films shown during film series in Itaú Cultural and
CINUSP (Cinema of the University of São Paulo). Later, in 2010, his Seri-
ous Games installations were exhibited at the 29th São Paulo Art Biennial,
during which time an extensive series of his films also took place at the
44 G. Rocha, Revolução do cinema novo, p. 201-202. “I spoke […] with Godard, who told me: ‘You, Brazilians, should
destroy cinema’. I don’t agree. You in France and Italy should destroy it. But we are still building it on all levels, in
language, aesthetics and technique.”; p. 151-152: “I recently spoke with Godard about political cinema. Godard insists
that we in Brazil are in an ideal situation to make revolutionary cinema, and contrary to this, we still make revisionist
cinema that is giving importance to drama and development of the spectacle. In his conception today there is a
cinema for four thousand people, from militant to militant. I understand Godard. As a European, French filmmaker,
it is logical that he would suggest the problem of destroying cinema. But we cannot destroy something that doesn’t
exist yet. And raising these issues is sectarian and therefore wrong. We are in a phase of national liberation that also
passes through cinema, and the relationship with the popular public is fundamental. We don’t have to destroy but
build. Movie theaters, houses, roads, schools, etc. ”
45 Nora Alter relates that Farocki adored football [soccer] and that it was the only arena in which he expressed
national pride. She also said that he watched the Brazilian World Cup games in 2014. It would be interesting to
know what his reaction was to the Brazilian team’s embarrassing 7-1 loss to the German side. How would he have
understood the images of a profound wound to Brazilian national pride?
46 See R. Bellour, La querelle des Dispositifs.
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70
47 See “The New Constructivism: Harun Farocki and Erika Balsom Discuss Parallel I–IV”, infra.
48 Ibidem.
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BIBLIOGRAPHY
ALTER, Nora. Two or Three Things I Know about Harun
Farocki. October, n. 151, Winter 2015.
______. The Political Im/perceptible: Images of The World...
In: ELSAESSER, Thomas. (ed.). Harun Farocki: Working
on the Sightlines. Amsterdam: Amsterdam Univ. Press,
2004.
ALTHUSSER, Louis. Aparelhos ideológicos de Estado.
São Paulo: Graal, 1992.
BALSOM, Erika. A World Beyond Control. <http://www.
lafuriaumana.it/index.php/56-archive/lfu-23/358-erika-
balsom-a-world-beyond-control>.
BALSOM, Erika; FAROCKI, Harun. Parallel I-IV: Conver-
sation. Conversation between Erika Balsom, Harun Farocki,
and the Public. <https://hkw.de/en/programm/projekte/
veranstaltung/p_103694.php>
BAUDRY, Jean-Louis. Le Dispositif: approches métapsy-
chologiques de l’impression de realité. Communications,
n. 23, 1975.
______. Cinéma: effets idéologiques produits par l’appareil
de base. Cinéthique, n. 7/8, 1970.
BECKER, Jörg. Images and Thoughts, People and Things,
Materials and Methods. In: ELSAESSER, Thomas. (ed.).
Harun Farocki: Working on the Sightlines. Amsterdam:
Amsterdam Univ. Press, 2004.
BELLOUR, Raymond. La querelle des dispositifis: Ci-
néma – installations, expositions. Paris: POL, 2012.
BENJAMIN, Walter. A obra de arte na época de sua re-
produtibilidade técnica. In: LIMA, Luiz Costa (org.). Teoria
da cultura de massa. São Paulo: Paz e Terra, 2000.
______. Que é o teatro épico? Um estudo sobre Brecht.
Magia e técnica, arte e política: Ensaios sobre literatura
e história da cultura. 7ed. São Paulo: Brasiliense, 1994.
(Obras escolhidas, v. 1).
BOIS, Yve-Alain. In Conversation: Rosalind Krauss with
Yve-Alain Bois. The Brooklyn Rail, Feb 1st, 2012. <http://
brooklynrail.org/2012/02/art/rosalind-krauss-with-yve-
alain-bois>. Acesso em: 12 mar. 2016.
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1 G. Didi-Huberman, Como Abrir Los Ojos, em H. Farocki (org.), Desconfiar de Las Imágenes, p. 28
2 Ibidem, p. 14, tradução nossa.
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DESIGN DE GAMES:
ENTRE VILÉM FLUSSER E HARUN FAROCKI
Em O mundo codificado, Flusser define o design como uma área em es-
treita sintonia com o mundo da comunicação. Longe de ver o design como
uma área separada da linguagem, ambas são codificações do mundo:
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7 Um dos paradoxos observados nos games é um fenômeno conhecido como uncanny valley, em que quanto mais
próximo a uma representação absoluta da figura humana uma personagem virtual fica, maior é o seu estranhamento
e menor se torna sua empatia com os jogadores.
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86
87
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BIBLIOGRAFIA
ARANTES, Priscila. Post-History, Technical Images And
Freedom in Times of Barbarism. Flusser Studies, n. 18,
Nov., 2014.
______. Media, Gestures And Society: Dialogues Bet-
ween Vilém Flusser And Fred Forest. Flusser Studies, n.
8, May., 2009.
______. Reescrituras da arte contemporânea: História,
arquivo e mídia. Porto Alegre: Sulina, 2005.
BAUDRILLARD, Jean. Simulacres et simulations. Paris:
Galilée, 1981.
CSIKSZENTMIHALYI, Mihaly. Flow: The Psychology of
Optimal Experience. New York: Harper Perennial Mo-
dern Classics, 2008.
DIDI-HUBERMAN, Georges. Como Abrir Los Ojos.
In: FAROCKI, Harun (org.). Desconfiar de Las Imágenes.
Buenos Aires: Caja Negra, 2013.
FLUSSER, Vilém. O mundo codificado: Por Uma Filosofia
do Design e da Comunicação. Organização de Rafael
Cardoso, tradução de Raquel Abi-Sâmara. São Paulo:
Cosac Naify, 2007.
______. Filosofia da caixa preta. São Paulo: Hucitec, 1985.
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PROGRAMMING
THE VISIBLE:
CONVERSATIONS
BETWEEN VILÉM
FLUSSER AND
HARUN FAROCKI
PRISCILA
ARANTES
SÉRGIO
NESTERIUK
HARUN FAROCKI : PROGRAMANDO O VISÍVEL
CONVERSATIONS BETWEEN VILÉM FLUSSER AND HARUN FAROCKI
The Programming the Visible exposition, presented at the Paço das Artes,
a São Paulo State Culture Ministry institution, from January 28th to March
27th in 2016 focused on questioning the nature of images from the 21st Cen-
tury. The exposition united a series of works by the artist and film maker
Harun Farocki (1944-2014): Parallel I-IV (2014), Interface (1995) and
Catch Phrases, Catch Images: A Conversation with Vilém Flusser (1986).
Harun Farocki is internationally known for his critical reading of the
images that make up the World. He made a series of films, many inspired by
Bertolt Brecht and Jean-Luc Godard, and during his last years of life migrat-
ed to the contemporary art universe, making films and installations about
the relationship between being human and the universe of technical images.
In 2010 he participated in the 29th São Paulo Biennial with the video
installation, Serious Games, which proposes reflection about computer
animation and the use of images focusing on debating violence. It’s start-
ing point comes from a therapeutic process developed with North-Ameri-
can soldiers who have had traumatic experiences in the Middle East.
Programming the Visible presented not only part of Farocki’s universe
but compared image dislocation captured by optical apparatus with those
built by computer algorithms. The exposition did not only discussed the
nature of contemporary images but their power to build the way we per-
ceive reality. In this case the title of the exposition (“Programming the
Visible” in English) could not be more appropriate. That which we see is
not only created by programming codes, but our visibility is programmed.
We live surrounded by a programmable world and manipulated by ma-
chine codes. The computer image, therefore, creates parallel worlds and
affects trajectories: the image is the very world-reality in which we live.
Parallel I-IV, one of the works presented in the show, is a four-part film
installation that looks at the gaming language, reflects about segments of
popular games and is generally narrated by an off-screen voice-over. In
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these films Farocki investigates the devices used for making images dur-
ing the history of art, such as the use of perspective in the Renaissance.
The work is a film installation about image history and representation
strategies through history.
During the series’ first film, released in 2012, Farocki analyzes the style
of computer graphics in 1980s computer which used images composed by
horizontal and vertical lines and dots without depth of field. In the sec-
ond and third films, both from 2014, the artist analysis productions that
use perspective and depth of field until we arrive at the fourth film, one
of the last works made by the artist, in 2014, which features game heroes
inspired by Los Angeles during the 1940s, in pre-apocalyptic images and
Western movies. Many of the sequences in this film are scary and violent;
with sequences from street fights, persecution and armed threats.
Farocki presents fundamental question in these films: the fact that we
live immersed in a world of images that have a decisive influence over the
way we see and behave confronted with reality. The work looks at the nature
of the image in the 21st Century which, diverging from optical images, discon-
nects from reality, creating its own reality with its own rules and creatures.
“The hero had no parents or teachers. He had to learn what the valid rules are
himself,” says an off camera voice in one of the films in the exhibition.
In this sense Farocki’s work seems to take on a political dimension
close to the surface in synch with Godard, the cinematic master of
creating terrific plans of beauty even when dressed in the unease and
intrinsic violence of contemporary life.
In his treatise, “Como Abrir los Ojos” (how to open the eyes), Georges
Didi-Huberman says Farocki passed his entire life obsessed with the same
question: “why, in what way and how is it that the production of images
participates in the destruction of human beings”1.
1 G. Didi-Huberman, Como Abrir Los Ojos, em H. Farocki (org.), Desconfiar de Las Imágenes, p. 28.
Maybe Farocki’s strategy was to cope with the violence of the world by
giving it back with more violence and reflect on the malaise of the world:
2 Ibidem, p. 14.
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By the end of the video Flusser calls attention to the fact that the in-
terview is also an image – since it is being filmed – and that, in this sense,
the spectator should have a critical and reflective relationship with what
he sees: “I think that honestly, when someone sees us on TV, it should be
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said. We should make an appeal to the spectators and say, ‘use this critical
ability because we are using the word against our very selves’.”
This is the point with which Flusser’s philosophy wants to intervene –
to produce a reflection about the possibilities of creation and visual criti-
cism as a society’s freedom is more and more programed and dominated
by technical images. In this manner, it is important to not trust images,
since they are codes and, in such, programmable.
4 Ibidem, p. 13.
5 M. Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience.
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and the void. Starting with the placement of a proposed ontology that
“the world does not exist if it is not being observed”, Farocki offers a
reflection to try to understand the infinitude of created spaces by these
operative images. “How far can we go?”, asks a voice in the video which
the images show attempts to pass unscalable or invisible borders pro-
grammed by the games.
The third video of the installation explores questions about displace-
ment showing the control of a camera and a form of of great zoom in/
zoom out that permits a nearly microscopic vision within a war combat
scene until pulling back reveals a scenario without sound that is sus-
pended in a kind of great void: “The world ends with a board”, the voice
in the video tells us. Through the means of manipulation of the game’s
programing code it is possible to make the camera penetrate objects and
solid surfaces showing them as if they were hollow inside. The absence of
collision provides other forms of experience and spatiality in this “new
constructivism”. In breaking with immediate relations between material
and form, the artist reinforces the hyper-real6 (Baudrillard: 1981) in the
manifestations of time and space proportioned by the manipulation of
the player, stimulating new forms of cognition and imagination: “Like the
child who rips up a doll to know the mysteries of representation,” says the
video narrator.
In the fourth video, Farocki investigates situation limits involving
characters controlled by the player and their interactions with npcs
(non-player characters) oriented by algorithm programming of artificial
intelligence. In addition to gratuitous violence, one of the artifices used
is to keep the character controlled by the player immobile in front of an
NPC, that is, to not act or seek forms of interaction that a gamer would
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FINAL CONSIDERATIONS:
(RE)PROGRAMMING THE (IN)VISIBLE
We can ponder that in proposing new forms of codification and decodi-
fication in the world, Farocki attributes different possibilities of use of an
artifice adding value not only to its model but, above all, the potentiality of
its information.
However, we can expand this consideration if we have other aspects
presented in the term “design” as a base, as much in its use as a substan-
tive as a verb. For Flusser, even with the most ordinary acceptance of the
term evokes an “evil and cunning” dimension because, according to him, “
design occurs in a context of tricks and fraud. The designer is, therefore, a
malicious conspirator who is dedicated to building traps.”8
In this way the artifacts that Farocki appropriates can be understood
as processes of intrigue, devices of trickery and in this sense, the very
lever, example used by Flusser, has the tricking of gravity as its main me-
chanical principle. In the same manner the philosopher believes that the
designer provokes the appearance of form and because of this should be
7 One of the paradoxes observed in the games is the phenomenon known as uncanny valley, in which the closer a
representation of a charecter becomes to the human figure the greater its estrangement and less empathy it gains
from players.
8 V. Flusser, O mundo codificado, p. 182.
101
9 Ibidem, p. 184.
102
BIBLIOGRAPHY
ARANTES, Priscila. Post-History, Technical Images And
Freedom in Times of Barbarism. Flusser Studies, n. 18,
Nov., 2014.
______. Media, Gestures And Society: Dialogues Between
Vilém Flusser And Fred Forest. Flusser Studies, n. 8, May,
2009.
______. Reescrituras da Arte Contemporânea: História,
Arquivo e Mídia. Porto Alegre: Sulina, 2005.
BAUDRILLARD, Jean. Simulacres et simulations. Paris:
Galilée, 1981.
CSIKSZENTMIHALYI, Mihaly. Flow: The Psychology of
Optimal Experience. New York: Harper Perennial Modern
Classics, 2008.
DIDI-HUBERMAN, Georges. Como Abrir Los Ojos. In:
FAROCKI, Harun (org.). Desconfiar de Las Imágenes.
Buenos Aires: Caja Negra, 2013.
FLUSSER, Vilém. O Mundo Codificado: Por Uma Filoso-
fia do Design e da Comunicação. Organização de Rafael
Cardoso, tradução de Raquel Abi-Sâmara. São Paulo: Cosac
Naify, 2007.
______. Filosofia da Caixa Preta. São Paulo: Hucitec,
1985.
O NOVO
CONSTRUTIVISMO
HARUN FAROCKI
E ERIKA BALSOM
CONVERSAM
SOBRE PARALELO
I-IV
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108
Harun Farocki Começou antes disso. Acho que meu trabalho sobre
esse tema é mais velho do que o gênero. Nos anos de 1980, comecei a
pensar em quantas vezes as imagens técnicas, muitas vezes, têm a ver
com a mensuração. Há todas estas formas de cálculo que criam uma
ferramenta para além da imagem. Esses são os antecessores e precur-
sores do processamento de imagens. Eu estava interessado nessas
coisas e tinha lidado com elas em vários filmes sobre as chamadas “ar-
mas inteligentes”, em que as imagens podem ser processadas de modo
que o destino ou a finalidade seja encontrado automaticamente. Ocor-
reram muitos testes durante a Guerra do Iraque em 1991. Mais tarde,
fiquei sabendo que animações de computador são utilizadas para fins
educacionais, como a formação de soldados, mas também para fins
terapêuticos. Agora, esse gênero de animação por computador tem 35
anos de idade. Há jogos sérios e os jogos não tão sérios. Mesmo nes-
tes jogos não tão sérios, um monte de tecnologias e ideologias estão
envolvidas. Quando o cinema tinha 35 anos de idade, já contava com
Arnheim, Balázs e Eisenstein entre seus teóricos. Então, alguém tinha
que começar. Com toda a modéstia, eu não estou teorizando os games,
mas de alguma forma eu tentei abrir esse campo para a reflexão.
renderizar. O vento nas árvores, é claro, tem uma longa história no cine-
ma; aparentemente, era o que mais fascinava os primeiros espectadores.
Em se tratando de temas que são tão intimamente ligados à teorização
do cinema, você está tentando estabelecer um quadro comparativo entre
cinema e videogames?
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110
HF Ah, sim. A ideia que eu tive nunca foi a de procurar pela novidade.
Eu sou um pouco estranho. Pode-se imaginar que eu tenha lido mais
livros ou que eu jogue videogames...
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112
Hito Steyerl [da plateia]: Obrigada, Harun, por apresentar esse trabalho
maravilhoso. Eu tenho duas perguntas, talvez até sejam apenas comen-
tários. A primeira é a questão de saber sobre se você em um determinado
momento considerou referir-se à animação como um precursor para estas
imagens geradas por computador. Parece-me que são as precursoras lógi-
cas do que você está mostrando. Em termos de ideias como gênese, gera-
ção, a criação de um novo mundo, e assim por diante, elas parecem muito
mais relacionadas, para mim, do que as imagens feitas por lentes. Talvez
esta seja uma grande mudança em relação às imagens feitas por lentes
como tais. Talvez a gente não precise mais da lente. O segundo comentá-
rio é sobre contingência e construtivismo. Parece-me que, pelo menos na
última geração de jogos, você tem tamanha liberdade em incluir a física
ficcional, em mudar completamente as leis da física e os conjuntos de
possibilidades dentro de universos. Eu tenho praticamente zero problema
com isso, porque remove as limitações fundamentais que de certa forma
condicionam o cinema. As coisas que podemos imaginar agora são muito
maiores e eu considero isso um grande benefício.
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ciado. Eu queria voltar a isso, porque assistir esses jogos por um tempo
torna impossível não pensar sobre o domínio do simbólico.
1 Alexander Galloway é autor de: Protocol: How Control Exists After Decentralization, MIT Press, 2004. Gaming: Essays
on Algorithmic Culture, University of Minnesota Press, 2006. E, em coautoria com Eugene Tracker, The Exploit: A
Theory of Networks. University of Minnesota Press, 2007, entre outros.
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116
EB Eu tenho uma pergunta muito simples, uma cuja resposta estou in-
teressada em ouvir. Trata-se do título desse trabalho. Eu posso pensar
em muitos paralelos potenciais que possam estar presentes em Paralelo,
mas eu gostaria de ouvir suas considerações sobre como você chegou a
esse título.
HF Tenho uma resposta muito simples. Com Second Life, nós tínha-
mos uma vida paralela. É a simples ideia de que os jogos são algo para-
lelo ao nosso mundo. O título não diz se eles são um modelo, um espe-
lho, ou uma janela para a realidade – apenas chama atenção para dizer
que eles são paralelos.
HF Sim, essa ideia de que o quadro esconde algo que continua para
além dele, é fortemente visível aqui. É uma ideia que Bazin elabora em
um texto bem curto, “Pintura e Cinema”. Há uma expressão em inglês
que não é usada em alemão: técnicos não falam em quadro, mas em
“janela” de um projetor ou de uma câmera. Para mim, esta é uma boa
metáfora, porque uma fenestra comprime algo. Pode-se ir um pouco
mais longe e dizer que no primeiro filme, Workers Leaving the Factory
(Trabalhadores deixando a fábrica), você só vê que eles são traba-
lhadores, porque estão comprimidos por esse elemento de possível
abertura. Se você tem um curral, você pode quantificar o número de
bovinos que você possui apenas por enviá-los através deste espaço
estreito. Nesses jogos, há esse desejo sem fim de continuar e explorar
cada vez mais. Sabe-se mais ou menos que o mundo não é realmen-
te acessível, mas se tem um desejo muito forte de explorá-lo. É uma
espécie de escopofilia compulsiva da qual gosto profundamente, em
especial, no cinema. Filmes permitem-me alimentar esse desejo, mas
há também uma presença forte disso nesses jogos.
EB Queria perguntar a você sobre sua escolha em expor seu trabalho como
uma instalação, como você fez no passado com Jogos sérios. Para deixar bem
claro, gostaria de perguntar: por que não apenas mostrá-lo em um cinema?
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118
HF Para ser mais modesto, deve haver sempre uma razão legítima para
usar uma tela dupla. Em alguns casos, era porque eu tinha que compa-
rar duas imagens. Em Paralelo III, era a ideia de que a cena final deveria
mostrar tanto a abordagem quanto o distanciamento do mundo do
jogo. Eu precisava de duas telas para isso e, depois, precisei encontrar
outros motivos para o uso delas. Tem a ver com a copresença, que é
uma abordagem interessante, e ela também pode se tornar bastante
estranha e perigosa. Logo você percebe que faz uso dessas duas telas
como faria uso de plano/contra-plano, como a maneira mais fácil de
estruturar uma sequência ou um discurso.
2 Alguns jogos oferecem a funcionalidade “Theater Mode” em que é possível gravar o jogo, para depois assisti-lo com
várias opções de pontos de vista, com diversos movimentos e posicionamentos de câmera. Ou seja, o jogador pode
fazer um filme de suas jogadas, exportá-lo e compartilhá-lo de diversas formas e formatos (N. da T.).
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120
HF Por um lado, você está certo. Por outro, pense em todas essas teorias
sobre a escritura na década de 1970, quando esses jogos estavam em
seus estágios iniciais. Muitas pessoas teorizaram que sempre que você
escreve, você é escrito pela linguagem. Este tipo de mediação é limitado,
não só pelas estruturas da linguagem e pelo gênero. Você está certo – eu
não quero negar, é claro que não é a mesma atividade da escritura. Mas,
talvez você possa escrever coisas novas ao jogar estes jogos.
HF Podemos ler nestes jogos todas aquelas coisas que são tão impor-
tantes na puberdade: como se posicionar, onde mexer e onde não me-
EB Parece que há uma lacuna ou, para ser mais preciso, “despsicologiza-
ção” desses avatares. Pergunto-me se isso é necessário para que o jogador
sinta que ele ou ela possa habitar plenamente ou controlar essa figura.
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122
EB Uma vez que nós temos os créditos nesta última sessão, eu queria
perguntar-lhe sobre a sua coletânea. Como você chegou à escolha destes
jogos específicos para seu trabalho? Você disse que você não joga videoga-
mes, portanto, quais foram os critérios que utilizou para selecioná-los? É
notável que muitos dos jogos com os quais você trabalha têm uma relação
com os gêneros cinematográficos clássicos.
EB Você diria que o prazer essencial dos videogames está nessa explo-
ração do mundo no lugar de, digamos, vencer? Muitos jogos são empre-
sas orientadas para os objetivos. Eu sei que em debates iniciais sobre
HF Sim, às vezes a gente faz a diferença entre jogo e jogar. Acho que
estou mais interessado no jogar. O milagre de jogar tem mais a ver com
imaginar, com preencher vazios. Provavelmente, nós não sabemos
o que realmente acontece. Se você observar crianças jogando, você
nunca vai saber o que se passa na imaginação delas. Eu tentei construir
algo em que você pudesse imaginar alguns aspectos do que acontece
durante o jogar.
EB Sim, em alguns casos você pega elementos do jogo que são explicita-
mente orientados para a progressão prospectiva e os desvia de modo a
descobrir o potencial para o jogar dentro do jogo. Eu também queria per-
guntar a você sobre outra coisa que se refere não só a Paralelo, mas a sua
prática como um todo: o que você acha que está em questão ao se produzir
análises de imagem através da produção de imagens em movimento, em
vez de através, por exemplo, de texto? Isso é algo que tem sido a essência
de seu trabalho por muitos anos. Eu venho de uma formação acadêmica,
por isso, muitas vezes eu encontro textos escritos que impulsionam ideias
que são em algumas instâncias semelhantes às que encontramos em Pa-
ralelo, mas acho que algo pode ser gerado por este trabalho que não está
disponível para a escritura. Portanto, gostaria de saber como você descre-
veria o seu investimento neste tipo de prática.
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BIBLIOGRAFIA
BAZIN, André. A Ontologia da Imagem Fotográfica. In:
XAVIER, Ismail. (org.). A Experiência do Cinema. São
Paulo: Graal, 1991.
______. Peinture et cinéma. Qu’est-ce que le cinéma?
20ed. Paris: Cerf, 2011.
GALLOWAY, Alexander. Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic
Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
2006.
______. Protocol: How Control Exists After Decentraliza-
tion. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004
GALLOWAY, Alexander; TRACKER, Eugene. The
Exploit: A Theory of Networks. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2007.
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THE NEW
CONSTRUCTIVISM
HARUN FAROCKI
AND ERIKA
BALSOM DISCUSS
PARALLEL I–IV
For many years, Harun Farocki has been interested in the rise of calcu-
lable images. In I Thought I Was Seeing Convicts (2000) and the Eye/
Machine trilogy (2001–03) he examined surveillance technologies, while
in Serious Games (2009–10) he looked at how the American military uses
computer-animated simulations for educational, training, and therapeu-
tic purposes. With Parallel I–IV (2012–14), this line of thinking continues
with an essayistic meditation on video games. Farocki foregoes any socio-
logical approach that would question whether games are “good” or “bad,”
instead examining their representational system. He seeks to understand
how they create their worlds, what the place of the human body might
be within them, and what kind of relationships they have to other media
forms. Parallel foregoes the obsession with novelty that is so often pres-
ent in discussions of gaming – and indeed is present in the very term “new
media” – to instead insert these games into a longer history of representa-
tion, one that takes us all the way back to pre-Hellenistic conceptions of
the world. He makes implicit reference to classic texts of film theory in
order to construct a comparative framework that disputes any narrative
of medium change as one of linear progress.
Parallel asks what the ramifications of the increasing dominance of
these computer-generated images might be. Importantly, Farocki begins
by turning to motifs from the natural world – such as wind, trees, and
clouds – which are closely tied to contingency and have historically been
allied to the mimetic power of cinema. Farocki finds in these charged mo-
tifs sites at which computer animation’s striving for verisimilitude is most
profound. The voiceover of Parallel I tells us, “In cinema, there is the wind
that blows and the wind blown by a wind machine. In computer images,
there is only one kind of wind: a new constructivism.” This notion of a new
constructivism and how to best characterize it are at the heart of Parallel:
it is Farocki’s way of describing a completely planned world, devoid of the
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***
Erika Balsom Maybe we can start by talking about the genesis of Parallel.
How did you become interested in working with these games? Was it an
outgrowth of your earlier work, Serious Games?
EB It’s really striking that the motifs that you use to unfold these ideas
of calculation in Parallel I tend to be motifs from the natural world that
are often associated with contingency. We have the flame, the cloud, the
wind, and the water. It’s notable that water is one of the things computer
animators have found most difficult to render. The wind of the trees, of
course, has a long history in film; apparently it was what most fascinated
the earliest spectators. In turning to motifs that are so closely linked to
theorization of cinema, are you attempting to create a comparative frame-
work between cinema and video games?
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EB It’s really striking that you take a very long view of the history of represen-
tation in this work. In some of the writing that exists on video games, there’s a
focus, or even an obsession, with novelty. Here, though, you look back very far
into the past, even to the ancient Egyptians. Can you speak a little about why
this was important to you?
HF Oh yes. The idea never came to me to look for novelty. I’m quite an
outsider. One might imagine that I’ve read more books or that I play
video games...
HF I don’t play, no. But I can entertain you with the fact that in Peen-
emünde, before I was born, they already had a joystick to steer the V-2.
It’s a German invention. Not only cinema was invented here, but also
the joystick. I’m not a player, but I had the idea to look at how these
games depict things. This has to do with my interest in how these im-
ages have become a kind of standard. My hypothesis is that the idea
of constructivism is very important to computer animation. We are
recreating the world. The questions of reference and verisimilitude
are very strong. But we have created this world and feel so smart to
have done so! We partake in this feeling when seeing a movie, playing
a game, or watching television. This is why I looked at how computer
animations depict things and how they have developed.
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EB About what you call a “new constructivism” it seems that a large part
of this is a vanquishing of contingency. Contingency has been a significant
part of how people have historically theorized the fascination of cinema.
If that element of fascination is now gone, where does the fascination of
video games lie? Do you think it’s in this idea of an omnipotence, in our
sense that we have entirely created this world?
Hito Steyerl [from the audience] Thanks, Harun, for showing this won-
derful work. I have two questions, maybe even just comments. The first
one is the question of whether you at a certain point considered referring
to animation as a precursor to these computer-generated images. It seems
to me that these are the logical precursors of what you’re showing. In
terms of the ideas of genesis, generation, the creation of a new world, and
so on, they seem much more related to me than lens-based imagery. May-
be this is about a shift away from lens-based imagery as such. Maybe we
don’t need the lens anymore. The second comment is about contingency
and constructivism. It seems to me that in at least the last generation of
games, you have such a liberty in including fictional physics, in completely
changing the laws of physics and the sets of possibilities within universes.
I have basically zero issues with this because it removes fundamental limi-
tations that sort of weighed down cinema. The things we can imagine now
are much enhanced and I consider this a real benefit.
HF I can’t judge. I would say that it’s like literary genre many rules are
set, and you might not be surprised, but you can be surprised, even by
a detective novel. In the case of your first comment, I just wanted to
keep it all to computer games and not introduce other things. More
or less, hand-made animation had a stylization of its own. Of course,
there were different genres of depiction coming from graphics and so
on. But if you look at Walt Disney or whatever, there was no attempt
to imitate cinematographic, live-action film. Somehow they tried to
have a style that made a quality of the limitations. It’s a bit astonishing
that computer animations don’t do this. They are arrogant enough to
become the new bourgeoisie. They don’t say, “It’s wonderful that we
have a job in this society!”
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child. Sociology says that is becoming smaller and smaller right now.
Children no longer explore the world; they only walk the five meters to
the next shop or subway station. Here you see it again in the impulse
to explore the world and the aspect of limitlessness. There are games
that place their figures in spaces the size of Great Britain. It can be very
boring, but you can navigate for days.
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ten cuts per minute and nowadays you have a new image every three
seconds or even every 1.5 seconds. There are no kids here so therefore I
can say it there are many kids who are unable to watch a film with shots
longer than three or ten seconds. They think they will die when they see
it! But they are able to play these games. Obviously, the symbolic agen-
cy of these games compensates for a well- or attractively edited film.
EB The ability to act upon the space also enables the body of the avatar to
go missing, so that we have a direct access to the on-screen world.
HF Yes, and breaking the rules is a part of every game. Trying to find out
if you can break the rules and what kind of punishment it might entail.
This is an experimental state that you have in every relation to authority.
EB I have a very simple question, but one I’m interested to hear you an-
swer. It concerns the title of this work. I can think of many potential paral-
lels that might be operative in Parallel, but I’d like to hear your thoughts
on how you came to this title.
HF Yes, this idea that the frame hides something that has to continue
beyond it is strongly visible here. It’s an idea that Bazin elaborates in
his very short text, “Cinema and Painting.” There’s an English expres-
sion that is not used in German technicians talk not about the frame,
but about the “gate” of a projector or a camera. For me, this is a good
metaphor because a gate compresses something. One can go a little bit
far and say that in the first film, Workers Leaving the Factory, you only
see that they are workers because they are compressed by this gate. If
you have a corral, you can quantify the number of cattle you have only
by sending them through this narrow space. In these games, you have
this endless desire to continue and explore more and more. One knows
more or less that the world is not really accessible, but one has a very
strong desire to explore. It is a kind of compulsive scopophilia that I
strongly like, especially in cinema. Films enable me to feed this desire,
but there is also something strong about it in these games.
EB I wanted to ask you about your choice to exhibit this work as an instal-
lation, as you have in the past with Serious Games. To put it very bluntly, I
would ask why not just show it in a cinema?
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Hito Steyerl [from the audience] I’m completely fascinated by your use of
the surface in Parallel III. It reminds me of something Siegfried Kracauer
wrote about, a term he called in German the “Oberflächenerscheinung,”
the surface appearance. For him, the surface appearance was basically a
documentary image of social relations that would be condensed in the
surface. This is really a general question that I don’t entirely expect you to
answer, but for me the really fascinating idea is that these games are docu-
mentaries in the sense that they are surface appearances. But of what?
What are they a documentary about? Which social relations are being con-
densed in them?
HF The most amazing aspect is that even the surface doesn’t exist from
both sides sometimes. Sometimes the surface is only visible from one
side, which is something new in post-Euclidean geometry and beyond
our experience. Perhaps it is this kind of mind-set that is documented,
like three-dimensional chess. I also wanted to add my collaborator
Matthias Rajmann found out that you can buy a device for 150 euros
to record your performance in HD quality. The kids can’t always say,
“Mother, look what I’ve done!” They have to record it, put it on You-
Tube, and then get a reaction. 150 euros is a lot, but if you work on this
kind of an installation, it’s really a wonderful opportunity. This idea
that people are making films by playing a game is really around. I found
it so astonishing that in theater mode you really can program a little
camera to move. Now every twelve-year-old can do it. This might also
be a liberating force for real cinema – no one wants to see all these Stea-
dicams anymore.
EB This ability to record the game also really alters the temporality of vid-
eo games. It changes from being about a kind of liveness and a volitional
mobility into something that is reproducible and distributable.
Audience member I wanted to ask you more about the political implica-
tions. You said that playing a game is more like writing than reading, but
the only writer that is there is the constructor of the game. It’s actually a
perfect illusion that we are writing, but we’re not. We are impotent, when
we think we are omnipotent.
HF On the one hand, you are right. On the other, think of all these
theories about writing in the 1970s, when these games were in their
early stages. So many people theorized that whenever you write, you
are written by language. This kind of agency is limited, not only by the
structures of language and by genre. You’re right – I don’t want to deny
it, of course it’s not the same agency of writing. But maybe you can
write new things by playing these games.
EB There’s a sense that the final part of Parallel circles back to the first
part. In Parallel I, we get the idea of calculation applied to the natural
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world trees and water. In Parallel IV, we get the idea of calculation articu-
lated in relation to human gesture. I started thinking back to how this was
an important part of the training of actors in the 1920s in the USSR. There
was the idea that human movement could be absolutely codified, with
every gesture attached to a specific meaning. But even in this form of actor
training, there is a palpable sense of embodiment that remains. In video
games, this completely vanishes. I’m wondering how we can conceptual-
ize the body of the video game avatar. Is it anything more than a program-
mable set of actions?
HF We can read in these games all those things that are so important
in puberty how to stand, where to scratch and where not to scratch,
and so on, all these movements. It’s very elaborate. When it comes to
the register of dialogue, it is more limited. I never understood why the
woman in Parallel IV sometimes takes a right and sometimes takes
a left. Perhaps it’s a glitch. Contingency comes back on this strange
minor scale. It’s like programmed ideas are contradicting themselves,
which you can also find in the classical narration of genre films.
HF That’s a good idea. It’s perhaps like what you call wishful thinking.
I have to take back this this idea about writing and reading. Perhaps
one should compare this kind of agency more to car culture, to the
agency of driving. It sounds a bit like cultural critique, but there is
unbelievable meaning ascribed to having gears and pedals. Now that
car culture is ending – it will soon come to an end here – we see the
EB Because we get the credits in this last section, I wanted to ask you
about your corpus. How did you come to select these particular games to
work with? You said that you don’t play games yourself, so what were the
criteria that you used to select them? It’s notable that many of the games
you work with have a relationship to classical cinematic genres.
HF In the case of Parallel I, it’s very simple, especially for people here in
Berlin. There is a computer game museum here. They are very knowl-
edgeable and they have devices you can use to play games that are no
longer technically accessible. They have emulators you can use to record
sequences with them. We asked them to offer us things and then we
picked them according to the idea of developing how the clouds and the
leaves were represented. In this case, there are many genres of games. I
wanted to show something about the exploration of the world, because
this aspect of exploration, or trying to find out what happens if I hit
somebody or I cross a certain line, is a form of in-built interpretation.
So we looked for certain kinds of images and for settings that have to
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EB Would you say that the essential pleasure of video games lies in this ex-
ploration of the world rather than in, say, winning? Many games are goal-
oriented enterprises. I know that in early debates around video games,
there were two schools of thought the ludologists and the narratologists.
The ludologists privileged play, while the narratologists were, as their
name would suggest, interested in the narrative orientation of games.
When you talk about your interest in exploring the game world, it sounds
to me like you’re putting yourself on the side of the ludologists.
EB Yes, in some cases you take elements of the game that are explicitly
oriented towards forward progression and derail them so as to find the
potential for play within the game. I also wanted to ask you about some-
thing else that pertains not only to Parallel but to your practice as a whole
what do you think is at stake in producing image analysis through the
production of moving images rather than through, say, text? This is some-
thing that has been at the heart of your work for many years. I come from
an academic background, so I often encounter written texts that put forth
ideas that are in some instances similar to those we encounter in Parallel,
but I think there’s something that can be generated in this work that is not
available to writing. So I was wondering how you would describe your in-
vestment in this kind of practice.
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BIBLIOGRAPHY
BAZIN, André. Ontologie de l’image photographique.
Qu’est-ce que le cinéma? 20ed. Paris Cerf, 2011.
______. Peinture et cinéma. Qu’est-ce que le cinéma?
20ed. Paris Cerf, 2011.
GALLOWAY, Alexander. Gaming Essays on Algorithmic
Culture. Minneapolis University of Minnesota Press, 2006.
______. Protocol How Control Exists After Decentral-
ization. Cambridge MIT Press, 2004
GALLOWAY, Alexander; TRACKER, Eugene. The Exploit
A Theory of Networks. Minneapolis University of Min-
nesota Press, 2007.
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146
SIMULAÇÃO E O
TRABALHO DA
INVISIBILIDADE:
PARALELO I-IV
DE HARUN
FAROCKI1
THOMAS
ELSAESSER
1 Conferência apresentada durante o evento “Life Remade”, na Birkbeck College, Universidade de Londres, entre 5 e
6 de junho de 2015. O ensaio virá a lume editado por Joel Mckim para um número especial de Animation, periódico da
Sage Publications.
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CRENDO NA IMAGEM
Em “A Evolução da linguagem do cinema”, André Bazin notoriamente
dividiu o mundo do cinema entre “cineastas que creem na imagem” e
“cineastas que creem na realidade”1. Frequentemente interpretada como
“antimontagem” e “anti-Eisenstein”, essa distinção – no contexto da obra
de Bazin – não é tão categoricamente direcionada à estética plano-sequên-
cia/profundidade de campo (à estética Renoir-Rossellini) como já pareceu
aos radicais (des)construtivistas na década de 1970, quando Bazin costu-
mava ser tratado como um “empirista teoricamente ingênuo”2.
De forma semelhante, há um tipo de ingenuidade enganosa na obra
Paralelo I-IV (2012-2014) de Harun Farocki, a qual devemos enfrentar sem
hesitação a fim de tentar compreender o que mais ela pode significar. Na
divisão de Bazin, Farocki, como o seu mentor Jean-Luc Godard, faz da
montagem a sua “bela preocupação”3 e, por isso, pertence ao grupo dos
diretores que creem na imagem, muito embora os outros mentores de
Farocki – Jean-Marie Straub e Danièle Huillet – possam ser considerados
a epítome dos diretores que creem na realidade, ou, no mínimo, na reali-
dade da mise-en-scène, pró-fílmica. No entanto, os dois lados se encontram
quando reconhecemos que “a crença na imagem” pode muito bem ser a
consequência e não a causa de uma desconfiança na imagem e que “a crença
na realidade” pode muito bem ser fundamentada em uma profunda per-
cepção de que o que se vê não é o que é.
Deixe-me, portanto, confrontar o que parece tão ingênuo a respeito
de Paralelo I-IV. À primeira vista, as quatro partes são como um curso para
principiantes em animação digital e em história da computação gráfica,
1 A. Bazin, The Evolution of the Language of Cinema, em L. Braudy; M. Cohen (eds.), Film Theory and Criticism, p. 43.
No texto original francês de Bazin, lê-se “croire” (crer), ao passo que no inglês de Elsaesser, lê-se “put faith” (ter fé),
que literalmente não dá conta em português. Optou-se, portanto, por uma versão mais fiel a Bazin (N. da T.).
2 Sabe-se que Bazin era o espantalho no trabalho de C. MacCabe, Realism and the Cinema: Notes on Some Brechtian
Thesis, Screen 15, n. 2, p. 7-27, o qual o chamava de “um empirista teoricamente ingênuo, tipo de idiota da família”.
3 J.-L. Godard, Montage, mon beau souci, Cahiers du cinéma, n. 65, p. 30-31.
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provisório – dois traços que alinham o trabalho dele com certas vertentes
da “arqueologia da mídia” ou – como pode ser o caso com Jogos sérios e
Paralelo I-IV –, o cineasta deliberadamente adota a postura de realizar um
work-in-progress, para sinalizar que está apresentando parte de uma in-
vestigação em curso – interrompida pela morte prematura de Farocki em
julho de 201410.
Dentro do espírito desse work-in-progress, vou oferecer variados con-
textos em que Paralelo I-IV faz sentido não só como parte de outras grandes
preocupações de Farocki, mas também como essa obra – quer esteja em
curso por omissão ou incompleta por necessidade –, pode lançar luz sobre
a nossa situação atual. Em princípio, esses contextos são: Representação e
Reprodução, Imagens Operacionais, Vigilância e as Forças Armadas, Simulação
e Dramatização e O Trabalho da Invisibilidade e a Invisibilidade do Trabalho.
REPRESENTAÇÃO E REPRODUÇÃO
OU O MATERIALISMO DE FAROCKI
Por um lado, Farocki talvez seja melhor conhecido por explorar a re-
lação entre imagens, máquinas de imagens e produção de imagem e, por
outro, a realidade social/política correspondente. Sob muitos aspectos um
materialista marxista clássico, ele percebeu que em algum momento as
imagens do século XX começaram a assumir uma vida própria, em vez de
ser representações de alguma realidade distinta ou exterior a elas. Con-
tudo, ele também sabia que as imagens estavam circulando como merca-
dorias que absorvem tanto a realidade social como o trabalho humano, no
sentido marxista de serem “fantasmagorias” e “fetiches-mercadoria”. Isso
o levou a uma crítica bastante fundamentada da “representação”, enquan-
to nosso paradigma de imagem dominante. Na entrevista que acabei de
10 Para uma retrospectiva contextual, publicada para homenagear Farocki, ver a edição especial do E-Flux, n. 59,
Nov., 2014, dedicada ao artista.
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mencionar, na verdade, uma das últimas que foi capaz de dar, ele conclui
afirmando: “a era da reprodução parece ter acabado, e a era da construção
do novo mundo parece estar no horizonte – não, ela já está aqui”11.
Destaco o uso que ele faz do termo “reprodução”, de Walter Benjamin,
para também abranger “representação” de maneira mais geral, assim
como “construção” que aqui significa ou inclui “simulação”. Quanto a
quais possam ser as outras implicações de uma mudança tão radical no
modo da representação, eu devo deixar para o fim, mas o que Farocki pa-
rece sinalizar é que houve uma mudança de valores padrão, de tal forma
que a imagem digital tornou-se agora o ponto de referência principal para
todos os tipos de imagens, incluindo as imagens analógicas, da mesma
maneira que discos de gramofone tiveram de ser novamente rotulados
“vinil”, porque daí por diante passaram a ser vistos a partir da perspecti-
va implícita do CD ou do download de mp3. Eis o que Farocki sugere ao
chamar tais simulações de representações do “tipo-ideal”, comparando-
-as aos modelos matemáticos ou algorítmicos da realidade, em geral,
incluindo a “formatação” de seres humanos, perfilando seus gostos e
preferências. Em certo sentido, isso implicaria que os modelos do mundo
feitos por computador “concorrem e derrotam” manifestações físicas e
materiais do mundo, e que, especificamente, o pró-fílmico não é mais a
origem e o fundamento da imagem, tornou-se apenas a sua matéria-prima
descartável. Diante disso, portanto, o interesse de Farocki na simulação
(ou, se quiser, a sua “crença na imagem digital”) parece ser o oposto do
seu materialismo, mas, por enquanto, podemos levar em conta a possibili-
dade de que existe um paradoxo – materialismo versus simulação – que se
resolve, revelando-se como dois lados da mesma moeda.
11 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c8YKKs0Pcx8>
IMAGENS OPERACIONAIS
Uma forma de abordar tal paradoxo é considerar como Farocki silen-
ciosamente tem reescrito a história do cinema, ao favorecer, durante sua
longa carreira como cineasta, um certo tipo de imagens, que ele chamou
de “imagens operacionais”. Estas são imagens e sequências cinemato-
gráficas extraídas de fontes muito diferentes e feitas para fins muito dis-
tintos: as fontes podem ser experimentos científicos, estudos de tempo
e movimento, apropriadas a partir do enorme arquivo de filmes médicos,
imagens de vigilância feitas pelos militares, filmes de instrução, filmes
industriais e imagens reconstituídas a partir de sensores e dispositivos
de controle. Os propósitos originais poderiam ser instrução, experimen-
tação, testes, monitoramento ou quando foram feitas gravações de fenô-
menos muito rápidos ou muito lentos para o olho humano. Esse material
de filme tende a ser chamado de found-footage12 e, agora, é procurado por
cineastas e artistas que trabalham na interface entre o cinema e a instala-
ção de arte, ou na travessia das fronteiras porosas entre documentários e
filme-ensaio. Farocki é cauteloso ao não tratar tais imagens como “encon-
tradas” e, geralmente, esforça-se ao máximo para indicar como e por que
esses filmes foram feitos, por quem e em que dispositivo institucional.
Ao desenterrar os usos industriais, científicos, burocráticos e milita-
res de imagens que geralmente simulam profundidade de campo e ação
à distância, Farocki desconstruiu, analisou bem como contextualizou
historicamente as imagens na iminência do “ver” e “agir”13. Ele está con-
trapondo nossa forma habitual de tratar as imagens como “visualizações
para serem vistas” com outra, que entende as imagens como fontes de
informação a serem digitalizadas, classificadas e editadas, em títulos que
12 No literal, “cenas encontradas” refere-se a imagens de arquivo filmadas por anônimos (N. da T.).
13 “Imagens operacionais” são discutidas por C. Blümlinger, “Harun Farocki: Critical Strategies”, em T. Elsaesser
(ed.), Harun Farocki: Working on the Sight-Lines, p. 318-320.
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14 Sobre Harun Farocki, ver também A. Ehmann; K. Eshun (eds.), Harun Farocki: Against What? Against Whom?
15 Ver C. Blümlinger, An Archaeologist of the Present, E-Flux, n. 59, Nov., 2014.
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159
160
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162
19 H. Farocki, Controlling Observation, em T. Elsaesser (ed.), Harun Farocki: Working on the Sight-Lines, p. 294.
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166
over nos informa, é que: “Com cada vez mais incerteza na sociedade, sobre
as regras e regulamentos pelos quais se viver, há mais e mais jogos, com a
vida treinada como um esporte”. Alguns anos depois, com Jogo profundo,
Farocki demonstrou graficamente como o esporte e o campo dos esportes
tornaram-se locais de trabalho, tão cuidadosamente monitorados como a
linha de montagem foi, desde os dias de “estudos de tempo e movimento”
de Frank e Lillian Gilbreth, na década de 1920.
Vivendo na RFA é uma ótima, triste, engraçada e profundamente irô-
nica pesquisa sobre essa obsessão com as experimentações de (e para a)
vida, bem como os terrores e as ansiedades à espreita logo abaixo da su-
perfície. Um blog capturou a estranheza do filme, mesmo que exagere em
suas polêmicas:
167
168
22 <http://www.labour-in-a-single-shot.net/en/project/concept/>.
169
170
seria um erro deixar por isso mesmo. Com Farocki, é-se bem aconselha-
do a complementar o não dito pelo dito, e se percebe as lacunas entre os
elementos que são criadas pela montagem. Porque é o próprio trabalho
da invisibilidade do cineasta que entra nesta montagem, e se manifesta
através de seus cortes invisíveis: separando o que é habitualmente pen-
sado para estar juntos, e juntando o que ninguém antes havia pensado
em associar ou conectar. E, assim, os longos silêncios em Paralelo entre
os comentários em voz off não estão lá somente para nós entendermos o
que está sendo dito, ou as imagens que se seguem, como se essas imagens
fossem meramente ilustrações das palavras. Em vez disso, os silêncios são
eles próprios algo como o contra-argumento, ou como Farocki gostava
de dizer, são a “contra-música”. Em outras palavras, Paralelo I-IV – como
o título sugere – poderia muito bem ser a película negativa a alguma coi-
sa, assim como, em grande parte, tenho argumentado que os manuais de
vida de Vivendo na RFA têm o desaparecimento do “trabalho” como um
meio de autorrealização, como sua película negativa e impressão invisível.
Então, de que modo pensar a estranheza de Vivendo na RFA junto com os
efeitos do vale de Paralelo I-IV?
Para me aproximar de uma resposta, devo retornar uma vez mais à
distinção de Bazin entre cineastas que creem na imagem e os que creem
na realidade. Depois do que argumentei até aqui, uma conclusão seria que
essa distinção não mais se aplica simplesmente a cineastas, mas também
a sociedades inteiras, onde – intermediada através dos diferentes tipos
de invisibilidade – aqueles que creem na dramatização e nos manuais
de vida, que usam seus corpos para exercícios em esteiras e pensam em
auto-otimização como a autoiluminação, ou aceitam a autoexploração
como “criatividade”, junto com aqueles que cada vez mais aperfeiçoam
fotos realísticas do mundo com animação computadorizada – assim, não
apenas tratando o mundo como uma cebola, que consiste em nada além
171
172
24 <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parrhasius_%28painter%29>.
173
174
tima análise, não haja nada “lá”) aponta para o que poderíamos ter perdi-
do neste novo mundo sem sombras, e, assim é o que está, por assim dizer,
inevitável e necessariamente “faltando” tanto em Jogos sérios como em
Paralelo I-IV: o cinema como uma vez o conhecemos, o cinema como ago-
ra é emblematicamente incorporado no diretor que, para Bazin foi o epí-
tome dos cineastas que creem na imagem, a saber, Alfred Hitchcock. Dele
podemos dizer – como de Parrásio: enquanto os Zêuxis entre os diretores
filmaram Marilyn Monroe ou Julia Roberts como se fossem reais, Hitch-
cock filmou o véu: o desejo por Melanie, por Marnie e por Madeleine.
Enquanto o cinema analógico, centrado na produção, procurou “cap-
turar” a realidade, a fim de “atrelá-la” a uma representação, o cinema digi-
tal, concebido a partir da perspectiva de pós-produção, procede por meio
de “extrair” a realidade, a fim de “coletá-la” em conjuntos de dados. Em
vez da divulgação e da revelação (a ontologia de filmes desde Jean Epstein
a Bazin, de Siegfried Kracauer a Stanley Cavell), ou colocar véus sobre o
mundo, para a mente e os sentidos melhor experimentarem seus próprios
prazeres e terrores (como em Hitchcock or Fritz Lang), um cinema de
pós-produção trata o mundo como um dado a ser a processado ou garim-
pado, como matérias-primas e recursos a serem explorados. Em outras
palavras, a mudança da produção para pós-produção, como o centro de
gravidade no cinema digital, altera mais do que um mero procedimento:
altera a lógica interna do cinema (e, portanto, sua ontologia). A ênfase na
pós-produção, tornada possível pelo digital – embora não “causada” por
ele – não é mais fundamentalmente baseada na percepção: sua visualidade
pode ser dita como da ordem dos vegetais, ou ambiental e ecológica. Não
admira, portanto, que Paralelo de Farocki comece ao retornar às folhas e
árvores, para as folhas de relva, o balanço das ondas, e para o ar, céu e as
nuvens: é onde o cinema começou e, com ele, a divisão entre “aqueles que
creem na realidade e aqueles que creem na imagem”. Para saber como foi
mais uma vez: Nos filmes, há o vento que sopra e o vento que é produzido por
uma máquina de vento. As imagens de computador não têm dois tipos de vento.
Mas isso é porque a verdadeira tempestade está soprando – ritmo Benja-
min25 – a partir das bordas e a partir da parte inferior, isto é, o “paraíso”
de pixels que agora chamamos progresso. Por outro lado, a pós-produção
como o novo valor padrão, também pode sinalizar o fim desse relaciona-
mento tão explorador do mundo e seus recursos, como o praticado pelo
capitalismo industrial. Isso também seria um respiro de ar fresco: talvez
os ventos do progresso, afinal de contas.
25 Referência à passagem do Angelus Novus, nas “Teses Sobre a Filosofia da História”, em W. Benjamin, On the
Concept of History.
175
176
BIBLIOGRAFIA
BAZIN, André. The Evolution of the Language of
Cinema. In: BRAUDY, Leo; COHEN, Marshall (eds.).
Film Theory and Criticism. New York: Oxford University
Press, 1999.
______. The Myth of Total Cinema. What is Cinema? v. 1.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967.
BENJAMIN, Walter. On the Concept of History. The
Theses on the Philosophy of History, 1974. Disponível em:
<http://members.efn.org/~dredmond/ThesesonHistory.
html>. Acesso em: 28 out. 2016.
BLÜMLINGER, Christa. An Archaeologist of the
Present. E-Flux, n. 59, Nov., 2014 Disponível em: <http://
www.e-flux.com/journal/an-archaeologist-of-the-
present/>. Acesso em: 28 out. 2016.
______. “Harun Farocki: Critical Strategies”. In:
ELSAESSER, Thomas. (ed.). Harun Farocki: Working
on the Sight-Lines. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University
Press, 2004.
E-FLUX. n. 59, Nov., 2014. Edição especial dedicada
a Farocki. Disponível em: <http://www.e-flux.com/
announcements/issue-59-harun-farocki-out-now/>.
Acesso em: 28 out. 2016.
EHMANN, Antje; ESHUN, Kodwo. (eds.). Harun
Farocki: Against What? Against Whom? Cologne: Walther
König, 2010.
FAROCKI, Harun. Controlling Observation. In:
ELSAESSER, Thomas. (ed.). Harun Farocki: Working
on the Sight-Lines. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University
Press, 2004. (Originalmente publicado na Alemanha em
Jungle World, n. 37, 8 Sept. 1999).
______. Schneeglöckchen blühen im September.
Filmkritik, mar., 1975.
FRANKE, Anselm. Modern Monsters / Death and Life
of Fiction. Taipei Biennial, 2012. Disponível em: <http://
proa.org/eng/exhibition-harun-farocki-obras-1.php>.
Acesso em: 28 out. 2016.
GODARD, Jean-Luc. Montage, mon beau souci. Cahiers
du cinéma, n. 65, 1965.
KITTLER, Friedrich. Gramophone, Film Typewriter.
Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999.
MACCABE, Colin. Realism and the Cinema: Notes on
Some Brechtian Thesis. Screen 15, n. 2, 1974.
MANOVICH, Lev. To Lie and to Act: Cinema and
Telepresence. In: ELSAESSER, Thomas; HOFFMANN,
Kay. (eds.). Cinema Futures: The Screen Arts in the Digital
Age. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1998.
______. What is Digital Cinema, 1995. Disponível em:
<http://manovich.net/index.php/projects/what-is-
digital-cinema >
OOGIANDUJAOO. Sterile Practice, Worldscinema,
7 Aug. 2010. Disponível em: <http://worldscinema.
org/2012/05/harun-farocki-leben-brd-aka-how-to-live-
in-the-german-federal-republic-1990/>. Acesso em: 28
out. 2016.
177
178
179
180
1 Hoje, há vasta bibliografia sobre o ensaio audiovisual sendo relida e recuperada, de Montaigne passando por
Theodor Adorno. No Brasil, Arlindo Machado, Ismail Xavier, Consuelo Lins, André Brasil entre outros, têm
se dedicado a pesquisas sobre realizadores com produção audiovisual, tendo a subjetividade como enfoque,
explicitando o sujeito de fala.
2 H. Farocki, Trailers escritos, em C. Borges; P. Mourão; M.D. Mourão, (orgs.), Harun Farocki: Por uma politização do
olhar, p. 66.
3 <http://www.harunfarocki.de/biography.html>.
4 Galloway é autor de Protocol: How Control Exists After Decentralization (2004); Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture
(2006); e, em coautoria com Eugene Tracker, The Exploit: A Theory of Networks (2007), entre outros.
5 Para uma genealogia do Machinima e debate sobre sua inscrição na história dos meios ver P. Moran; J. Patrocínio,
(orgs.), Machinima.
181
182
8 Idem, ibidem, p. 3.
9 H. Farocki, op. cit., p. 68.
183
184
10 M. Nitsch, Reivindicando seu espaço: Machinima, em P. Moran; P. Janaina (orgs.), Machinima, p. 76.
11 J. Patrocínio, A questão não é “O que é Machinima?” mas “Por que Machinima? em P. Moran; J. Patrocínio (orgs.),
Machinima, p. 100.
185
186
(pág anterior)
IMAGEM 1
MISTERY HOUSE, 1980.
PARALELO 1
IMAGEM 2
A CIÊNCIA DA COMPUTAÇÃO.
PARALELO I.
IMAGENS 3
A CRIAÇÃO DE ÁGUA.
PARALELO I
187
188
189
190
14 Ver O novo construtivismo: Harun Farocki e Erika Balsom conversam sobre Parallel I-IV, supra.
15 Ver idem, ibidem.
191
192
16 A fórmula S-A-S (da situação à situação transformada por meio da ação) é proposta por Noël Burch e chamada a
grande forma, traz a atualização de potências. Para a grande e pequena forma ver: G. Deleuze, A imagem-movimento,
p. 178-220.
193
194
(ao lado)
IMAGEM 4
EM DIREÇÃO À
FALTA DE GRAVIDADE.
PARALELO II
IMAGEM 5
FORA DA ÁREA
DE SEGURANÇA.
PARALELO II
195
196
IMAGEM 6
ESCOLHENDO O MODO.
PARALELO II
BIBLIOGRAFIA
ADORNO, Theodor W. O ensaio como forma. Notas
de literatura 1. Tradução: Jorge de Almeida. SP: Duas
Cidades, 2003.
DELEUZE, Gilles. A imagem-movimento. São Paulo:
Brasiliense, 1985.
ELSAESSER, Thomas; ALBERRO, Alexander.
Farocki: A Frame For No Longer Visible: Thomas
Elsaesser in Conversation With Alexander Alberro.
E-Flux, n. 59, nov. 2014. Edição especial dedicada a
Farocki. Disponível em: <http://www.e-flux.com/
announcements/issue-59-harun-farocki-out-now/>.
Acesso em: 28 out. 2016.
ELSAESSER, Thomas. Harun Farocki: Cineasta, artista
e teórico da mídia. In: BORGES, Cristian; MOURÃO,
Patrícia; MOURÃO, Maria Dora (orgs.). Harun Farocki:
Por uma politização do olhar. São Paulo: Cinemateca
Brasileira, 2010. Disponível em: < http://cinemateca.
gov.br/farocki/catalogo.php>. Acesso em: 21 nov. 2016.
______. (ed.). Harun Farocki, Working on the Sightlines.
Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2004.
FAROCKI, Harun. Trailers escritos. In: BORGES,
Cristian; MOURÃO, Patrícia; MOURÃO, Maria Dora
(orgs.). Harun Farocki: Por uma politização do olhar. São
Paulo: Cinemateca Brasileira, 2010.
FLUSSER, Vilém. Palavras-chave, imagens-chave:
Diálogo de Harun Farocki com Vilém Flusser. In: YOEL,
Gerardo (org.). Pensar o cinema: Imagem, ética e filosofia.
São Paulo: CosacNaify, 2015.
GALLOWAY, Alexander. Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic
Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
2006.
______. Protocol: How Control Exists After
Decentralization. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004.
GALLOWAY, Alexander; TRACKER, Eugene. The
Exploit: A Theory of Networks. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2007.
LOWOOD, Henry. A tecnologia encontrada: Jogadores
como inovadores na produção de Machinima. In:
MORAN, Patricia; PATROCÍNIO, Janaina (orgs.)
Machinima. São Paulo: Pró-Reitoria de Cultura e
Extensão da USP, 2011.
MACHADO, Arlindo. O filme-ensaio. Intermídias, n. 5/6,
2006. Disponível em: <www.intermidias.com/miolo/
cinema_home.htm>.
NITSCHE, Michael. Reivindicando seu espaço:
Machinima. In: MORAN, Patrícia; JANAINA, Patrocínio
(orgs.). Machinima. São Paulo: Pró-Reitoria de Cultura e
Extensão da USP, 2011.
PATROCÍNIO, Janaina. A questão não é “O que é
machinima?” mas “Por que machinima? In: MORAN,
Patricia; PATROCÍNIO, Janaina (orgs.). Machinima. São
Paulo: Pró-Reitoria de Cultura e Extensão da USP, 2011.
197
198
FAROCKI:
IMAGES AND
CONVENTIONS
IN THE GAME
AND ART
PATRÍCIA MORAN
1 There is a vast bibliography about the audiovisual essay form that is being reread and recuperated, from Montaigne
passing through to Theodor Adorno. In Brazil, Arlindo Machado, Ismail Xavier, Consuelo Lins, and André Brasil,
among others, have researched artists with audiovisual production by focusing on subjectivity and making explicit
the matter of speech.
2 H. Farocki, “Trailers Escritos”, in C. Borges; P. Mourão; M.D. Mourão, (org.), Harun Farocki: Por uma politização do
olhar, p. 66.
199
200
3 <http://www.harunfarocki.de/biography.html>.
4 Galloway is the author of Protocol: How Control Exists After Decentralization (2004); Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic
Culture (2006); and, with Eugene Tracker, The Exploit: A Theory of Networks (2007), among others.
5 For a genealogy of machinima and the debate over its inscription in the history of mediums, see P. Moran; J.
Patrocínio, (orgs.), Machinima.
201
202
203
204
certainly this entrance into the arts circuit had a direct relationship
with Farocki’s formal research and inquiries. The cinematographic
apparatus of the theater is not the ideal place for essayistic projects
like Parallel. The work does not fit inside a large room, nor does it
seek resolution – to the contrary, it looks to place tension on the
structures and materiality of the image. The platform of machinima
is the result of programming modules and it brings within itself
the Verbund, with one of its distinctive traits being the fact that it
“combines, mixes and freely transforms elements of traditional
media”10. However, Janaína Patrocínio claims that this platform of
creation “does not modify the forms of seeing or representing the
world […]. To the contrary, there are, in many examples, efforts to
reproduce it”11. The recombination of social structures lacks sparks
of sense and of relation sufficient towards promoting noise in terms
of meaning. Parallel I-IV provokes the medium and its fragilities.
Since the director’s paths are disruptive, he uses the image and
the structure of the open game in order to relocate problems of
representation in the history of art and a new notion of space
foreseen in games.
Farocki problematized perspectives of questionable approaches
to representation throughout the history of art in images created
from distinct material conditions and contexts. He circumscribed
models in their strictly formal aspects, as well as the ideas implied
by them. He treated any and all objects that were representative
10 M. Nitsch, “Reivindicando seu espaço: Machinima”, in P. Moran; P. Janaina (org.), Machinima, p. 76.
11 J. Patrocínio, “A questão não é ‘O que é Machinima?’ mas ‘Por que Machinima?’” in P. Moran; J. Patrocínio (org.),
Machinima, p. 100.
205
206
(pág anterior)
IMAGE 1
MISTERY HOUSE, 1980.
PARALELO 1
IMAGE 2
THE
COMPUTER SCIENCE.
PARALELO I.
IMAGE 3
THE CREATION OF WATER.
PARALELO I
207
208
209
210
14 See “The New Constructivism: Harun Farocki and Erika Balsom Discuss Parallel I–IV”, supra.
15 Ibidem.
211
212
issues covered and the usage of the game images change over
time. The installation utilizes the visual appearance of` a game
propitiated by the specular quality of the characters to treat
looping and engine programming as social behaviors. It creates
with the automation of the game an opportunity to discuss human
processes based in non-thinking and repetitive habits, since, as
in the onscreen beings in games, our species routinely repeats
movements, gestures, and customs. In each of the Parallels, points
of approximation and the distance between the materiality of
physical and virtual bodies are all explored.
Parallel II begins by inquiring into what comes to be the
perception and the possibility of existence of a world if I am
not “observing” it. From there, the work goes on to explore
the unreality of game space. A cowboy hits the rocks and walks
aimlessly, a guard crashes a car into a virtual cement structure, the
determined guard goes to a stoplight and confiscates a man’s car
in order only to crash into the same spot. If the material world can
continue existing with or without my presence, then the world
of games loses meaning and continues existing as nonsense. The
guard crashes repeatedly, the circling plane awaits the player, enters
a forbidden zone, and is advised by the voice of the game about
the danger there. There is a countdown and the plane explodes.
The continual rhythm of the neutral voice-over is overtaken by a
nervous countdown. The voice of God, i.e., the voice of the narrator,
is neutral, while the voices of the game characters bring fear and
irritability. Two time periods alternate, that of the continual tone
213
214
215
216
(ao lado)
IMAGEM 4
EM DIREÇÃO À
FALTA DE GRAVIDADE.
PARALELO II
IMAGEM 5
FORA DA ÁREA
DE SEGURANÇA.
PARALELO II
217
218
(pág anterior)
IMAGEM 1
MISTERY HOUSE, 1980.
PARALELO 1
IMAGEM 2
A CIÊNCIA DA COMPUTAÇÃO.
PARALELO I.
IMAGENS 3
A CRIAÇÃO DE ÁGUA.
PARALELO I
BIBLIOGRAPHY
219
220
SOBRE UMA
POSSÍVEL
FOTOGENIA NOS
VIDEOGAMES:
A PROPÓSITO
DE PARALLEL
I-IV (2012-2014),
DE HARUN
FAROCKI
ALFREDO SUPPIA
221
222
1 S. Turkle, Video Games and Computer Holding Power, em N. Wardrip-Fruin; N. Montfort (eds.), The New Media
Reader, p. 511: “The emotional power of videogames draws heavily on the computer power within that supports a
simulated world and a medidative environment”. Todas as traduções do inglês e do francês são minhas.
Ainda segundo Rodowick, “Em cada uma de suas obras, Farocki nos
pergunta novamente: ‘o que é uma imagem?’ ou, melhor, ‘o que é a imagem
humana?’ [...]. [N]os pede para reconsiderar como cada imagem provoca
tanto a inteligência quanto a ética do ver”3. Se a simulação se comporta
como um tema-chave ou tutorial em Imagens do mundo e inscrições da
guerra, e mesmo em O fogo inextinguível, em Jogos sérios Farocki passa
a escrutinar mais detidamente a simulação digital, computadorizada.
Videoinstalação dividida em quatro partes ou “capítulos”, Jogos sérios
baseia-se em material coletado em centros de treinamento militar em
Twentynine Palms, na Califórnia, em uma instituição de atendimento a
soldados com estresse pós-traumático. A terapia compreende a exposição
desses soldados a recriações de situação de trauma de guerra em simula-
ções de realidade virtual. À exceção de Jogos sérios II: Três mortos, todos os
demais capítulos da série são constituídos por imagens contíguas, numa
interface em que Farocki procede a um cotejo entre registros documentá-
rios (videográficos) de ex-soldados submetidos à terapia contra estresse
pós-traumático e imagens digitais interativas. Rodowick salienta que “[d]
e fato, a questão-chave aqui é entender a simulação como uma variante
central na filosofia da imagem de Farocki, e como a expansão da sua escri-
tura audiovisual por meio da montagem recombinatória”4. O experimento
ético e estético procedido por Farocki em 2010 com Jogos sérios continua
e se expande numa obra posterior do cineasta, ausente do arco de análise
2 D.N. Rodowick, A consciência liberada de Harun Farocki, em G.A. Sobrinho (org.), Cinemas em redes, p. 77.
3 Ibidem, p. 69.
4 Ibidem, p. 75.
223
224
5 Classificar uma obra de Farocki é quase sempre uma tarefa ingrata e problemática. Aqui pretendo assumir
uma provável dimensão ensaística do cinema de Farocki, à revelia de problematizações mais detidas como a
de D.N. Rodowick, para quem “Farocki observou, relatou, criticou, e analisou e desconstruiu, por vezes, com a
própria voz e, por outras, estrategicamente utilizando voz alheia numa relação indireta livre. É tentador dizer
que Farocki trabalhou com o gênero do filme-ensaio, embora essa categoria possa ser muito restrita e vaga para
conter a amplitude inventiva de suas obras em imagem em movimento, nem mesmo elas podem ser diretamente
consideradas documentários em qualquer sentido restritivo”, Ver Ibidem, p. 69.
6 No jargão da informática, um “ovo de páscoa” ou easter egg, em inglês, como é mais conhecido, é qualquer item
oculto passível de ser encontrado em qualquer tipo de sistema virtual, incluindo músicas, filmes, videogames, etc.
225
226
Com base nele, poderíamos dizer que uma nascente “teoria” do roteiro
para videogames nada mais é do que uma adaptação de uma certa “teoria”7
do roteiro para cinema.8
Heavy Rain, Hell e Adventure, entre outros títulos, deixaram-me curioso,
ao menos desde 2009, a respeito de uma possível história paralela – ou jus-
taposta – do cinema e dos videogames. Minha hipótese é a de que há muitos
pontos em comum entre a história do estilo cinematográfico e a história do
estilo dos videogames, e mesmo os pontos mais divergentes me parecem
igualmente instigantes e significativos. Como se a história dos videogames
repetisse, em vários momentos, a história do cinema, ora como farsa, ora
como tragédia, por vezes avançando em fast forward, por outras a contrape-
lo ou em reverso. Creio que tal hipótese ou ideia esteja longe de ser nova ou
original, pois vem informando o trabalho de uma variedade de autores, ora
mais, ora menos explicitamente, como em Manovich9, Jenkins10, Wardrip-
-Fruin e Montfort11, Manovich e Kratky12, Bateman13, Wardrip-Fruin e Har-
rigan14, Harrigan e Wardrip-Fruin15, ou Stanton16.
Da mesma forma que se costuma escrutinar a história do cinema
(entenda-se aqui, sobretudo, uma história do estilo cinematográfico), a
partir de uma compartimentação em movimentos, escolas e períodos (e.g.
cinema clássico e cinema moderno), bem como em “autores”, suponho
que o mesmo possa ser feito em relação a uma história dos videogames. Por
7 Entre aspas, porque talvez esses conjuntos de saberes não cheguem a tanto.
8 Teoria do roteiro para o cinema, por sua vez substancialmente tributária da literatura e da dramaturgia.
9 L. Manovich, The Language of New Media; e L. Manovich, What is Digital Cinema? em P. Lunenfeld (ed.), The Digital
Dialectic.
10 H. Jenkins, Game Design as Narrative Architecture, em N. Wardrip-Fruin; N. Montfort (eds.), The New Media
Reader.
11 N. Wardrip-Fruin; N. Montfort (eds.), The New Media Reader.
12 L. Manovich; A. Kratky, Soft Cinema.
13 C. Bateman (ed.), Game Writing.
14 N. Wardrip-Fruin; P. Harrigan, First Person.
15 P. Harrigan; N. Wardrip-Fruin, Second Person; P. Harrigan; N. Wardrip-Fruin, Third Person.
16 R. Stanton, A Brief History of Video Games.
17 Ibidem, p. 277.
18 H. Jenkins, op. cit., p. 119.
227
228
justificado, entre outros aspectos, pelo fato de que a indústria dos games
incorporou amplamente a tradição da linguagem cinematográfica em seus
produtos, bem como muito do sistema de produção da indústria audiovi-
sual. Há pelo menos trinta anos, muitos dos lançamentos cinematográficos
são seguidos de lançamentos no mercado de games, e vice-versa, ou então
ambos os produtos (o filme e o game) são pensados em concerto. É justa-
mente um esforço mais detido de investigação do paralelo cinema-video-
game que Harun Farocki faz em Paralelo I-IV. Na verdade, uma investigação
que justapõe, a partir da história dos videogames, as histórias do cinema e
da pintura, com uma finalidade última de melhor compreender o fascínio
exercido pelos videogames nas artes, cultura e comportamento contempo-
râneos. Como se Farocki, intuitivamente ou não, investigasse cinematica-
mente a proposta de Jenkins, para quem a espacialidade se apresenta como
fator-chave para um novo entendimento das relações entre videogames e
narrativas (e, por extensão, videogames e cinema), baseado na concepção
de que os game designers talvez sejam menos contadores de histórias do
que “arquitetos narrativos” (narrative architects)19. Numa tentativa de re-
conciliar duas frentes teóricas – a dos ludologistas, cujo foco recai sobre
a mecânica do ato de jogar, e a dos narratologistas, os quais se interessam
pelo estudo dos videogames no contexto mais amplo das mídias narrati-
vas20 –, Henry Jenkins propõe uma abordagem limítrofe, entre os territó-
rios da ludologia e da narratologia, respeitando as particularidades dos
videogames, e examinando-os menos como meras histórias e mais como
espaços plenos de possibilidades narrativas21.
Como bem lembra Sherry Turkle, por volta de 1982 as pessoas (no
caso, a classe média americana) já gastavam mais dinheiro em videogames
19 Ibidem, p. 121.
20 Ibidem, p. 118.
21 Ibidem, p. 119.
229
230
27 Ibidem, p. 272.
28 Ibidem.
231
232
Paralelo II poderia assim sugerir, para além de “jogo, logo existo” (paródia
do cogito ergo sum cartesiano), algo como “o mundo existe porque eu o jogo”.
Por sua vez, Paralelo III é um filme sobre cartografias virtuais/digitais.
Ele expande as questões levantadas nos episódios I e II, concentrando-se
sobre a “pele” dos objetos. André Bazin já se referiu a Jean Renoir como o
“maior diretor francês”, um cineasta cuja câmera seria capaz de “tocar” a
“pele das coisas”: “Mil exemplos poderiam ilustrar esta maravilhosa sen-
sibilidade à realidade física e tátil do objeto e de seu meio; os filmes de Re-
noir são feitos com a pele das coisas. Donde acontece que sua encenação
seja tantas vezes uma carícia”30. Em Paralelo III, Farocki investiga o que há
por baixo da “pele” dos objetos que habitam a mise-en-scène dos videoga-
mes - e não encontra senão o vazio. As “câmeras” dos videogames (desne-
cessário dizer que não há câmera alguma no sentido tradicional do termo)
penetram os objetos para demonstrar que, se por fora um pedestal de
granito parece sólido e pesado, resistente aos tiros de uma metralhadora,
por dentro se comporta como um cubo transparente, leve, diáfano, sem
substância senão aquela que demarca as linhas retas de seus contornos.
O mar é novamente citado como apenas uma superfície, como um tecido
29 Ibidem, p. 298.
30 A. Bazin, O realismo impossível, p. 110.
233
234
235
236
37 Entusiasta de Space War e ex-aluno do MIT, Bushnell fundou a Atari para comercializar Pong, primeiro game
possível de ser jogado em ambiente doméstico, e não num laboratório de computação (como Space War), graças a
um aparelho muito menor que uma máquina de pinball.
Xavier explica que a frase de Méliès ainda hoje induz à pergunta: afinal,
o que é mesmo o cinema? Seria a cena da família burguesa ao redor de sua
38 I. Xavier, Maquinações do olhar: A cinefilia como ver além na imanência, em A.S. Médola; D. Araújo; F. Bruno
(orgs.), Livro da XV Compós, p. 24.
237
238
39 Ibidem, p. 25.
40 Ibidem, p. 26.
41 J. Epstein apud J. Aumont, As teorias dos cineastas, p. 92, grifos meus.
239
240
241
242
48 Ibidem, p. 71-72.
49 J. Epstein apud J. Aumont, op. cit., p. 92.
50 J. Aumont, op. cit., p. 92.
tino palpitar das folhas, tal como se reiterou na reflexão que amplificou o
alcance das palavras de Méliès, tornadas referência emblemática”51.
Xavier continua explicando que
243
244
53 M. Turvey, Epstein, Bergson and Vision, em T. Trifonova (ed.), European Film Theory, p. 93-94.
54 Ver, por exemplo, G. Currie, Image and Mind; e S. Prince, True Lies: Perceptual Realism, Digital Images, and Film
Theory, Film Quarterly, v. 49, n. 3.
245
246
56 Ibidem, p. 192.
57 G. Currie, op. cit.; S. Prince, op. cit.
58 Seeing-in é um conceito introduzido por Richard Wollheim em Art and its Objects, retomado por Currie:
“Describing our capacity to recognize what is depicted in a Picture, Richard Wollheim has spoken of seeing-in. We
see the Duke of Wellington in the Picture Just as we see the face in the clouds or the figure in the frosted window
pane. Seeing-in is a psychological phenomenon, a mental capacity we contingently possess” (Descrevendo
nossa capacidade de reconhecer o que é retratado em uma pintura, Richard Wollheim tem falado de seeing-in.
Vemos o Duke de Wellington em uma pintura exatamente como vemos o rosto nas nuvens ou a figura em uma
vidraça de janela congelada. Seeing-in é um fenômeno psicológico, uma capacidade mental que nós possuímos
contigencialmente), ver G. Currie, op. cit., p. 90.
59 Ibidem.
60 Ibidem, p. 79.
61 Ibidem, p. 90.
62 Ibidem, p. 111.
247
248
249
250
251
252
Após seu “mergulho” nas águas dos videogames, Farocki sobe aos
céus dos ambientes virtuais digitais a partir dos 10’47” de Paralelo I. Dos
253
254
255
256
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Campinas: Papirus, 2008. _______. The World As Will And Idea, v. 2. 6ed. London:
AUMONT, Jacques; MARIE, Michel. Dicionário teórico e Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., 1909. Disponível
crítico de cinema. 3 ed. Campinas: Papirus, 2007. em: <https://www.gutenberg.org/files/40097/40097-pdf.
BENJAMIN, Walter. A obra de arte na época de sua pdf?session_id=2e353b1a7b9e58faf24c283beade3342f
reprodutibilidade técnica. In: LIMA, Luiz Costa (org.). d8a5085>.
Teoria da cultura de massa. São Paulo: Paz e Terra, 2000. _______. The World As Will And Idea, v. 3. 6ed. London:
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CURRIE, Gregory. Image and Mind: Film, Philosophy, and TURKLE, Sherry. Video Games and Computer Holding
Cognitive Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Power. In: WARDRIP-FRUIN, Noah; MONTFORT,
Press, 1995. Nick. (eds.). The New Media Reader. Cambridge: The
EPSTEIN, Jean. Écrits sur le cinéma: 1921-1953. Paris: MIT Press, 2003.
Seghers, 1975. TURVEY, Malcolm. Epstein, Bergson and Vision. In:
HARRIGAN, Pat; WARDRIP-FRUIN, Noah. Third TRIFONOVA, Temenuga (ed.). European Film Theory.
Person: Authoring and Exploring Vast Narratives. New York: Routledge, 2008.
Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2009. XAVIER, Ismail. Maquinações do olhar: A cinefilia
______. Second Person: Role-Playing and Story in Games como ver além na imanência. In: MÉDOLA, Ana Sílvia;
and Playable Media. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2007. ARAÚJO, Denise; BRUNO, Fernanda (orgs.). Livro da
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Architecture. In: WARDRIP-FRUIN, Noah; Alegre: Sulina, 2007.
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PRINCE, Stephen. True Lies: Perceptual Realism,
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258
ON A POSSIBLE
PHOTOGENIC IN
VIDEO GAMES:
THE PROPOSAL
OF PARALLEL
I-IV (2012-2014),
BY HARUN
FAROCKI
ALFREDO SUPPIA
HARUN FAROCKI : PROGRAMANDO O VISÍVEL
ON A POSSIBLE PHOTOGENIC IN VIDEO GAMES
1 S. Turkle, Video Games and Computer Holding Power, in N. Wardrip-Fruin; N. Montfort (eds.), The New Media
Reader, p. 511.
259
260
2 D.N. Rodowick, A consciência liberada de Harun Farocki, in G.A. Sobrinho (org.), Cinemas em redes, p. 77. We would like to
thank the author for letting us have access to the English version of his conference.
3 Ibidem, p. 69.
4 Ibidem, p. 75.
one of the director’s posterior works that is absent in the analytic arc pro-
posed by Rodowick. This work is the Parallel I-IV (2012-2014) series, one
of the artist’s last works. Still relatively unknown, this video installation
piece was brought to Brazil for the first time by curator Jane de Almeida
for the exhibition Programming the Visible: Harun Farocki, which ran
from January 28 to March 27 at the Paço das Artes in São Paulo.
Parallel I-IV (2012-2014) by Harun Farocki can be understood as
a rehearsal film55 in four episodes, geared towards an aspect which has
drawn my attention for nearly seven years, ever since I first heard of the
computer game Heavy Rain (Quantic Dream; Sony Computer Entertain-
ment, 2010), released for Play-Station 3. An example of an artifact residing
in the borderland between the domains of video game and cinema, Heavy
Rain functions as an interactive film in which the player takes on the roles
of characters in a detective story drama. Heavy Rain reminds me of Hell:
A Cyberpunk Thriller (Take-Two Interactive Software; Game Tek, 1994),
an RPG style “point and click” adventure game for PC. Hell gained notori-
ety because it was one of the first games released in CD-Rom which used
dialogue and high resolution graphics, similar to another title of its era,
Bloodnet (Microprose, 1993), another cyberpunk role playing style video
game. As in an interactive film, the player in Hell investigates a futuristic
police conspiracy using a virtual space where he or she must act and en-
gage with characters “digitally incarnated” by actors such as Dennis Hop-
per, Grace Jones, Stephanie Seymour and Geoffrey Holder. Seymour and
5 Classifying Farocki’s work is almost always an unpleasant and troublesome task. Here I intend to explore a probable essayist
dimension of Farocki’s work, in contrast to more specific problematizations such as those expounded upon by D.N. Rodowick.
For Rodowick, “Farocki observed, reported, critiqued, analyzed, and deconstructed, sometimes in his own voice and other
times strategically deploying the voice of others in a free indirect relation. It is tempting to say that Farocki worked in the genre
of the essay film, though this might be too small and vague a category to contain the inventive breadth of his moving image
works, nor can they be considered straight-forwardly documentary in any restrictive sense.” Ibidem, p. 69.
261
262
Holder appear in live action images in the game, while other actors, like
Hopper and Jones, lend their voices to avatars. The drama of Hell takes
place in 2095 in a dystopian future where the US is under the control of
a fascist theocracy called the “Hand of God,” which has the capability of
sending individuals deemed to be criminals and insurgents to hell. Some
of these individuals, however, are able to return to tell their story.
In Hell, we see the entrance of professional cinema actors into the
videogame market for the first time. Its increasing complex narrative is
heavily inspired by the tradition of Hollywood script writing and recycles
prior ideas such as the schematic Adventure, considered to be the first
action-adventure video game, which was created by Warren Robinett
and commercially released in 1979 for the Atari 2600 console. Adventure
consists of a 2D graphic version of William Crowther’s original Colossal
Cave Adventure (1975-1976), which in turn was an adaptation of popular
RPGs like Dungeons & Dragons for a computer environment. Adventure
also enabled the hero to use a collection of items, with the player deciding
which item to use at any given moment using only the joystick, instead of
having to insert text based commands – the collection of items for player
use had existed in Colossal Cave Adventure but became more intuitive
with Adventure. At the time, Atari did not give credit to its designers/
programmers. Furthermore, Adventure was the first game to feature a
well-known “easter egg”6 – in this case, a room (in the game) where one
could read “Created by Warren Robinett”. It is not surprising that a book
like Game Writing: Narrative Skills for Videogames, complied by Chris
Bateman and focused on teaching game creation (game design), contains
so many references to film studies, especially in its first three chapters.
6 In computer jargon an “Easter egg” is a hidden item that can be found in any type of virtual system, including songs, films,
video games, etc.
Accordingly, we can say that a nascent theory of video game scripts was
nothing more than an adaptation of a certain “theory”7 of film scripts8.
Heavy Rain, Hell and Adventure, among others, have heightened
my curiosity, at least since 2009, with respect to a possible parallel his-
tory or juxtaposition of cinema and video games. My hypothesis is that
there are many commonalities between the history of cinematic style and
the history of video game style. Even when the history of cinematic style
and the history of video games diverge, their differences seem equally
instigative and significant to me. It is as if the history of video games has
been a repetition, at various moments, of the history of film - sometimes
as farce, sometimes as tragedy, at times advancing in fast forward and at
other times moving in unexpected ways or even in reverse. It is important
to note that this hypothesis or idea is far from being new or original, espe-
cially when taking into account the work, at times more or less explicit, of
various authors such as Manovich9, Jenkins10, Wardrip-Fruin and Mont-
fort11, Manovich and Kratky1212, Bateman1313, Wardrip-Fruin and Harri-
gan14, Harrigan and Wardrip-Fruin15 or Stanton16.
7 In quotations because maybe this body of knowledge has not gone so far.
8 Film script theory, in turn, is heavily indebted to literature and drama.
9 L. Manovich, The Language of New Media; and L. Manovich, What is Digital Cinema? in P. Lunenfeld (ed.), The Digital
Dialectic.
10 H. Jenkins, Game Design as Narrative Architecture, in N. Wardrip-Fruin; N. Montfort (eds.), The New Media Reader.
11 H. Jenkins, Game Design as Narrative Architecture, in N. Wardrip-Fruin; N. Montfort (eds.), The New Media Reader.
12 L . Manovich; A. Kratky, Soft Cinema.
13 C. Bateman (ed.), Game Writing.
14 N. Wardrip-Fruin; P. Harrigan, First Person.
15P. Harrigan; N. Wardrip-Fruin, Second Person; P. Harrigan; N. Wardrip-Fruin, Third Person.
263
264
17Ibidem, p. 277.
that the application of cinema theory to games can be overly crude, gener-
ally failing to recognize the more profound differences between the two
forms of media18. A parallel history of cinema is also justified, among other
reasons, by the fact that the games industry largely incorporates cinemat-
ographic language and tradition in its products, as well as various aspects
from the audiovisual industry’s production system. For at least 30 years,
many movie launches have been followed by video game launches and vice
versa, showing that both products (film and game) are thought of in tan-
dem. And this is precisely what Harun Farocki does in Parallel I-IV with
his impactful investigation into the cinema-video game parallel. In fact,
his exploration of this parallel juxtaposes, with video games serving as his
starting point, the histories of cinema and painting, with the ultimate goal
of better understanding the fascination of contemporary art and culture
with video games. It is as if Farocki, intuitively or not, cinematographically
investigates the proposal put forth by Jenkins, for whom spatiality is con-
sidered a key factor for a new understanding of the relation between video
games and narratives (and, by extension, video games and cinema), which
is based on the notion that game designers would perhaps be better story
tellers than narrative architects1919.
In an attempt to reconcile two theoretical fronts – that of the
ludologists, whose focus falls on the mechanics of the act of playing, and
that of the narratologists, who are interested in the study of video games
in the larger context of narrative media2020 – Henry Jenkins proposes a
borderline approach to understanding the domain existing between the
territories of ludology and narratology, respecting the peculiarities of vid-
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266
eo games and examining them less as mere histories and more as spaces
abounding with narrative possibilities21.
As Sherry Turkle reminds us, by 1982, people (in this case, the
American middle class) were already spending more money on video
games than on cinema and music combined22. And, by 1983, the computer
had become so engrained in contemporary life that Time magazine de-
cided to put it on its cover in the usual place of the man or woman of the
year23. In large measure, Farocki’s work Parallel I-IV was also informed by
the holding power of computers, conforming to Turkle’s proposal:
Turkle also observes that video games offer yet another promise con-
nected to the very presence of the computer that goes beyond the “built
21 Ibidem, p. 119
22S. Turkle, op. cit., p. 500.
23Ibidem.
24 Ibidem, p. 501.
25Ibidem, p. 511.
267
268
28 Ibidem.
269
270
29 Ibidem, p. 138.
30 A. Bazin, O realismo impossível, p. 110.
271
272
34 S. Keller, Introduction, in S. Keller; J.N. Paul (eds.), Jean Epstein: Critical Essays and New Translations, p. 25
35 S. Turkle, op. cit., p. 506.
36 R. Stanton, op. cit., p. 65.
273
274
egetic space into which the player enters. With respect to the tree in Mys-
tery House, Farocki embarks on an chronological investigation of the rep-
resentation of trees in various video games. An image from Pitfall (1982)
follows an image from Mystery House to illustrate his argument. In Pitfall,
which was made for the Atari console, the trees are static and restricted
to the backdrop. However, it is the trees’ small variations in positioning
and disposition that inform the player that he can move throughout the
forest. Veins on tree trunks and some nuance in terms of light and shad-
ows over treetops only appear two years later, for the first time, in King’s
Quest (Sierra Entertainment, 1984), albeit in a still very rudimentary
form. Parallel I progresses by demonstrating that in The Legend of Zelda
(Nintendo 1986) squared trees with more pronounced shading multiply
on the screen, while in Archipelagos (Prism/Astral Software, 1989), maybe
for the first time, the trees are given a true narrative function in the game
beyond being mere ornamentation or part of the set designs.
Nevertheless, contrary to what Parallel I seems to suggest regard-
ing the history of video games since Pitfall, trees in games have a less obvi-
ous function than mere decoration. In fact, trees in video games have had,
most often, the purpose of rendering the movement of characters. They
dictate the player’s progress along a diegetic virtual territory. It is the
trees, in their immobility, that, alternating or multiplying themselves with
minute variations in form and positioning on the game screen, suggest a
“territory in exploration” that moves beyond the bi-dimensional screen of
the electronic monitor. There is nothing trivial about this function: with-
out the trees (understood here as “digital representations of trees”), vid-
eo games may have never advanced beyond Space War, the first computer
game created by MIT at the beginning of the 1960s, or Pong (Atari, 1972),
37 Bushnell, a fan of Space War and ex MIT student, founded Atari to commercialize Pong, the first game that could be played
in a domestic environment and not in a computer lab (like Space War), thanks to the fact that it was a gadget that was much
275
276
Xavier points out that, even today, Méliés’ statement still elicits the
question: after all, what really is cinema? Is it the scene of the bourgeois
family around the table? Or, is it the capturing of the movement of leaves in
the wind? The following assertion put forth by Xavier, which has as its foun-
dation Méliès’ observations on the Lumière brothers’ film, can also effec-
tively serve Farocki’s investigation into the digital representation of trees
from Mystery House to Anno 1701:
38 I. Xavier, Maquinac ões do olhar: A cinefilia como ver além na imanência, in A.S. Médola; D. Araújo; F. Bruno (orgs.),
Livro da XV Compós, p. 24.
39 Ibidem, p. 25.
40 Ibidem, p. 26.
277
278
that moment, what was understood as photogénie was the object, in gen-
eral a face, which had a pleasing appearance when photographed; that is,
an object that is valued by photography, which in turn reveals unexpected,
enchanting and poetic aspects of an object, qualities virtually inacces-
sible to the naked eye42. In the aesthetic conception of the vanguard, as
in Louis Delluc, but more particularly in Jean Epstein, “the photogénie
constitutes a sensitive increase of reality through its filming, which can be
obtained by slow motion, by illumination or by great design”43. Especially
in Epstein, the photogénie – a term that is abstract and never proven or
defined in an unequivocal manner – is confused with a “great mystery”
that accounts for the “sensory and sensitive increase of reality through its
filming”44. Jacques Aumont and Michel Marie, for example, link the idea
of photogénie to the ontological concept of the photographic image pres-
ent in the thoughts of Sigfried Kracauer: “who speaks of the revelation of
‘things normally unseen’ as a kind of essence of this image”45. In “Bonjour
Cinema”, from 1921, Epstein proposes that the photogénie should be the
opposite of the literary:
42 J. Aumont; M. Marie, Dicionário teórico e crítico de cinema, p. 136.
279
280
In his writings from the 1930s and the post war era, Epstein begins to
confer a philosophic and psychological dimension to the term photogé-
nie. Aumont explains that, according to Epstein’s reflections, “Cinema
reveals something of the interior of the filmed subjects: this takes part in
the revelation of the photogénie (and even its essence).”47 Aumont goes
on to explain aspects that, to me, seem fundamental when considering the
thoughts and ideas provoked by Farocki’s Parallel I-IV. Jacques Aumont
comments on Epstein’s photogénie as follows:
46 J. Epstein apud J. Aumont, op. cit., p. 91-92.
47 J. Aumont, op. cit., p. 70.
48 Ibidem, p. 71-72.
49 J. Epstein apud J. Aumont, op. cit., p. 92.
281
282
51 I. Xavier, op. cit., p. 26.
52 Ibidem, p. 26-27.
53 M. Turvey, “Epstein, Bergson and Vision”, in T. Trifonova (ed.), European Film Theory, p. 93-94.
54 See G. Currie, Image and Mind; and S. Prince, True Lies: Perceptual Realism, Digital Images, and Film Theory, Film
Quarterly, v. 49, n. 3.
283
284
works of authors such as Lev Manovich (2000), the frontiers between the
cinematographic image, which is more indexical in nature, and computer
graphics imagery (CGI) have become increasingly fuzzy and indistinct.
Manovich proposes that:
Manovich observes that for the greater part of the 20th Century the in-
dexical paradigm (which is best illustrated by the concept of kino-eye pro-
posed by Dziga Vertov) prevailed. However, the turn of the 21st Century
saw the strong reemergence of a pre-cinematic representational paradigm
which Manovich calls kino-brush. In other words, Manovich suggests that
digital technologies in contemporary cinema recovered animated cinema
and non-automated techniques of image creation, securing their position
in today’s mainstream cinema – the success of contemporary animation
films, as is the case of studios like Disney-Pixar or Fox Animation, as well
55 L. Manovich, What is Digital Cinema? in P. Lunenfeld, op. cit., p. 175.
Given the the limited scope of this article, I will not further dis-
cuss Manovich’s observations here but, instead, emphasize that such
discussions could favor a possible transmutation of the concept of
photogénie into the territory of video games. In lieu of the indexical
paradigm,concepts such as perceptual realism57, seeing-in58 and likeness
56 Ibidem, p. 192.
57 G. Currie, op. cit.; S. Prince, op. cit.
58 Seeing-in is a concept introduced by Richard Wolheim in Art and its Objects taken up by Curie: “Describing our capacity to
recognize what is depicted in a picture, Richard Wollheim has spoken of seeing-in. We see the Duke of Wellington in the picture
Just as we see the face in the clouds or the figure in the frosted window pane. Seeing-in is a psychological phenomenon, a mental
capacity we contingently possess”, see G. Currie, op. cit., p. 90.
285
286
59
may be employed in a contemporary discussion on film, videogames and
realism. Such concepts are more attuned to aspects like analogy and ico-
nicity than the indexical paradigm that had been so prevalent in cinematic
realist theories for so many years. Gregory Currie argues that similarity,
or likeness, could be a defensible version of cinematographic realism. The
author also defends the idea that there should be cinematic styles which
are more realist than others, in the sense of a realism deeply-rooted in
similarity – the long shot and the depth of field are some of the most no-
table examples60. The concept of similarity reintroduced by Currie is at
the core of his proposal of perceptual realism. He explains that naturally
regenerative systems of representation, such as photography and cinema,
function by means of exploring our visual capacity to recognize represent-
ed objects, and in this way the experience of recognizing a photograph of
a horse is, in significant terms, identical to the experience of recognizing a
live horse. It is this type of realism that Currie denominates as perceptual
realism, and it is reasonable to suppose that the same would be as equally
valid and applicable in the context of videogames as it would be for natu-
rally generative representation systems. Inversely, in cases of systems of
representation that are not naturally generative, but operate by conven-
tion (such as the case of natural language or literature), we see little to no
degree of perceptual realism61. For Currie: “(...) representations are per-
ceptually realist when they share significant perceptive qualities with the
things they represent.”62
Such concepts and categories seem better equipped for an in-
59 Ibidem.
60 Ibidem, p. 79.
61 Ibidem, p. 90.
62 Ibidem, p. 111.
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63 R. Barthes, O rumor da língua, p. 190.
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in his work The Black Square (a black square over a white background),
painted between 1913 and 1915. Accordingly, video games such as Pong
or Adventure are also indebted to the Suprematism of Malevitch, even if
only for essentially technological or infrastructural reasons. Perhaps it is
not by chance that Farocki opted for smaller frames instead of the typical
film and video frames in some of the episodes of his Parallel I-IV, with the
frames isolated or in pairs, containing cut images like pieces in a puzzle.
The interface of Parallel I is Suprematist in this sense, albeit in reverse,
now with frames of audiovisual images over a black background. While
the layout of Parallel I is abandoned in episode II, where images extracted
from video games come to occupy the totality of the screen, the Supre-
matist nature of the layout returns in Parallel III.
With its representation of water from 07’26” to 09’06”, Parallel I
evokes a problem related to the representation of light. After all, the rep-
resentation of water, as a reflective surface, appears to depend consider-
ably on the representation of light in virtual digital environments, as has
always been the case with painting. The better treatment the light is given,
the more valued the water becomes, which has held true for the entire
history of video games, from the most schematic to the most realistic-
naturalistic. The thesis that, during their short period of existence, video
games have followed a reverse trajectory from that of the pictorial arts of
the last 1000 years is definitively expressed in the following narrative pas-
sage:
64 Cf. Rodowick, op. cit., p. 74.
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After diving into the waters of video games, Farocki rises up to the
sky of virtual environments, starting at 10’47” in Parallel I. From 11’16” to
14’14”, Parallel I shifts its focus to the work of a young designer, demiurge
of a virtual world that begins with him populating the simulacrum of a
blue sky seen on his computer screen with clouds. Until 13’45” in Paral-
lel I, the young digital designer organizes the clouds – their shape, size,
aspects, configuration, distribution and perspective – so that afterwards
he can give them movement. The movement of the clouds over the blue
sky – movement equivalent to the leaves of the trees in Anno 1701 or the
waves in the ocean simulations – is perhaps analogous in its photogénie
to the shaking of the leaves in The Baby’s Meal. Once again, the photo-
génie comes into play. The young professional equally devotes himself
to manipulating the movement of the clouds, now in a realist or even
hyper-realist fashion, as opposed to games such a Super Mario Brothers
(Nintendo, 1985), where the clouds are limited to small white masses with
some points of shade, dislocating themselves horizontally on the visu-
ally pixelated video game screen. The narrator of Parallel I says, “Here are
clouds formed by squares” (14’37” – 14’39”).
Following the tradition of thinkers such as Walter Benjamin (ac-
cording to whom photography would have freed the pictorial arts from
their commitment to the representation of reality) and Andre Bazin (with
his ontology of the photographic image and film realism), this line of
thought is eventually paraphrased at the end of Farocki’s film, when the
narrator suggests that the increasingly realistic images of video games
might surpass cinema in their figurative and representational power (a
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fascination with the cinematic image. I believe that throughout the en-
tirety of the series Parallel I-IV, but even more specifically in episode I,
Farocki suggests a photogénie specific to video games, a new form of pho-
togénie, characteristic of a new way of seeing the world.
While preparing this text, two new video games were launched
on the market: Pokémon Go (Niantic, Inc., July 2016) and No Man’s Sky
(Hello Games, August 2016). For use on cellphones and benefitting from
augmented reality technology, Pokémon Go has brought millions of play-
ers into the streets in various countries to hunt little monsters from the
Pokémon franchise, which appear superimposed onto the reality of the
most varied public and private environments. No Man’s Sky, launched
for both PlayStation 4 and Microsoft Windows platforms, promotes an
endless game with a potentially infinite narrative. With a story based on
space exploration, No Man’s Sky tries to simulate an entire universe for its
player by means of a powerful algorithm that promises more than 18 quin-
tillion possible planets waiting to be explored by the hero-astronaut. In a
“first person” and “open world survival game” style, No Man’s Sky capital-
izes on ideas that were delineated and developed in games like the Grand
Theft Auto series and Spore (Maxis, 2008). Thus, it becomes logical to
surmise that certain reflections on the contemporary ethics and aesthet-
ics of computer imagery, some of which are put forth by Farocki in Parallel
I-IV, are only just beginning to come to fruition.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
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INTERFACE
HARUN FAROCKI
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ou um decodificador?
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INTERFACE
HARUN FAROCKI
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Harun Farocki (1944-2014), German artist and filmmaker, was born in the
Czech Republic. Beginning in 1967, he made around 120 audiovisual works
(among them films and installations) that sought to question the practice
of image-making in a highly original and critical manner. Highlights from
his body of work include films such as The Inextinguishable Fire (1969) and
Images of the World and the Inscription of War (1988) and installations like
Interface (1995), Serious Games (2014), and Parallel I-IV (2010-2014).
COLABORADORES
Contributors
Erika Balsom is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies and Liberal Arts at King’s
College London, specializing in the study of the moving image in art.
She is the author of Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art (Amsterdam
University Press, 2013) and the co-editor of Documentary Across Disciplines
(MIT Press, 2016). Her next book, After Uniqueness: A History of Film and
Video Art in Circulation, will be published by Columbia University Press
in 2017. She is a frequent contributor to the journals Artforum and Sight
and Sound, and she has also published widely in academic journals and in
exhibition catalogues.
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Priscila Arantes is the Artistic Director and curator of the Paço das Artes,
an institution linked to the São Paulo State Secretary of Culture, since
2007. She is also a professor in the undergraduate and graduate course Art:
History, Critics and Curatorship at PUC/SP. She did a post-doctorate at
Pennsylvania State University (U.S.A.) and she is the author of Arte@Mí-
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CRÉDITOS
Credits
CONSELHO DE ADMINISTRAÇÃO
Administrative Board
Presidente President
Antônio Hermann
Coordenadora
Coordinator
Maria Gonçalves da Silva
Equipe
Team
Aldo P. R. Filho
Alexandre Oliveira Rodrigues
Harun Farocki: CONSELHO CIENTÍFICO
Programando o visível DA COLEÇÃO CINUSP
Harun Farocki: Scientific Board of the
Programming the Visible CINUSP Collection
Exposição realizada de 28 de janeiro
a 27 de março de 2016 no Paço das Consuelo Lins
Artes - Av. da Universidade, 1 - Cidade Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro
Universitária.
Exhibition held from January 28th – Cristian Borges
March 27th, 2016 at Paço das Artes Universidade de São Paulo
Av. da Universidade, 1 - Cidade
Universitária, São Paulo. João Luis Vieira
Universidade Federal Fluminense
Artista
Artist Jorge La Ferla
Harun Farocki Universidad de Buenos Aires
Equipamentos audiovisuais
Audiovisual Equipment
Fusionáudio
Realização
Realization
Paço das Artes
COLEÇÃO CINUSP
1. ROBERT BRESSON (2011)
Daniel Ifanger, Rafael Nantes e Ricardo Miyada (Orgs.)
2. MACHINIMA (2012)
Patrícia Moran e Janaína Patrocínio (Orgs.)